MY PERSONAL BARBARIAN was asleep, but woke, catlike, when I crawled into bed. He stretched out an arm and gathered me into himself with a sleepily interrogative “mmmm?”
I nestled against him, tight muscles beginning to relax automatically into his warmth.
“Mmmm.”
“Ah. And how’s our wee Tom, then?” He leaned back a little and his big hands came down on my trapezius, kneading the knots from my neck and shoulders.
“Oh. Oh. Obnoxious, prickly, censorious, and very drunk. Otherwise, fine. Oh, yes. More, please—up a bit, oh, yes. Oooh.”
“Aye, well, that sounds like Tom at his best—bar the drunkenness. If ye groan like that, Sassenach, he’ll think I’m rubbing something other than your neck.”
“I do not care,” I said, eyes closed, the better to appreciate the exquisite sensations vibrating through my spinal column. “I’ve had quite enough of Tom Christie for the moment. Besides, he’s likely passed out by now, with as much as he’s had to drink.”
Still, I tempered my vocal response, in the interests of my patient’s rest.
“Where did that Bible come from?” I asked, though the answer was obvious. Jenny must have sent it from Lallybroch; her last parcel had arrived a few days before, while I was visiting Salem.
Jamie answered the question I’d really asked, sighing so his breath stirred my hair.
“It gave me a queer turn to see it, when I came to it among the books my sister sent. I couldna quite decide what to do with it, aye?”
Little wonder if it had given him a turn.
“Why did she send it, did she say?” My shoulders were beginning to relax, the ache between them dulling. I felt him shrug behind me.
“She sent it with some other books; said she was turning out the attic and found a box of them, so decided to send them to me. But she did mention hearing that the village of Kildennie had decided to emigrate to North Carolina; they’re all MacGregors up near there, ken?”
“Oh, I see.” Jamie had once told me that his intention was one day to find the mother of Alex MacGregor, and give her his Bible, with the information that her son had been avenged. He had made inquiries after Culloden, but discovered that both of the MacGregor parents were dead. Only a sister remained alive, and she had married and left her home; no one knew quite where she was, or even whether she was still in Scotland.
“Do you think Jenny—or Ian, rather—found the sister at last? And she lived in that village?”
He shrugged again, and with a final squeeze of my shoulders, left off.
“It may be. Ye ken Jenny; she’d leave it to me whether to search for the woman.”
“And will you?” I rolled over to face him. Alex MacGregor had hanged himself, rather than live as prey to Black Jack Randall. Jack Randall was dead, had died at Culloden. But Jamie’s memories of Culloden were no more than fragments, driven from him by the trauma of the battle and the fever he had suffered afterward. He had waked, wounded, with Jack Randall’s body lying on top of him—but had no recollection of what had happened.
And yet, I supposed, Alex MacGregor had been avenged—whether or not by Jamie’s hand.
He thought about that for a moment, and I felt the small stirring as he tapped the two stiff fingers of his right hand against his thigh.
“I’ll ask,” he said finally. “Her name was Mairi.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, there can’t be more than, oh . . . three or four hundred women named Mairi in North Carolina.”
That made him laugh, and we drifted off to sleep, to the accompaniment of Tom Christie’s stertorous snores across the hall.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN minutes or hours later that I woke suddenly, listening. The room was dark, the fire cold on the hearth, and the shutters rattling faintly. I tensed a little, trying to wake enough to rise and go to my patient—but then heard him, a long wheezing inspiration, followed by a rumbling snore.
It wasn’t that that had wakened me, I realized. It was the sudden silence beside me. Jamie was lying stiff beside me, scarcely breathing.
I put out a hand slowly, so he would not be shocked at the touch, and rested it on his leg. He hadn’t had nightmares for some months, but I recognized the signs.
“What is it?” I whispered.
He drew breath a little deeper than usual, and his body seemed momentarily to draw in upon itself. I didn’t move, but left my hand on his leg, feeling the muscle flex microscopically beneath my fingers, a tiny intimation of flight.
He didn’t flee, though. He moved his shoulders in a brief, violent twitch, then let out his breath and settled into the mattress. He didn’t speak for a bit, but his weight drew me closer, like a moon pulled near to its planet. I lay quiet, my hand on him, my hip against his—flesh of his flesh.
He stared upward, into the shadows between the beams. I could see the line of his profile, and the shine of his eyes as he blinked now and then.
“In the dark . . .” he whispered at last, “there at Ardsmuir, we lay in the dark. Sometimes there was a moon, or starlight, but even then, ye couldna see anything on the floor where we lay. It was naught but black—but ye could hear.”
Hear the breathing of the forty men in the cell, and the shuffles and shifts of their movement. Snores, coughing, the sounds of restless sleep—and the small furtive sounds from those who lay awake.
“It would be weeks, and we wouldna think of it.” His voice was coming easier now. “We were always starved, cold. Worn to the bone. Ye dinna think much, then; only of how to put one foot in front of another, lift another stone. . . . Ye dinna really want to think, ken? And it’s easy enough not to. For a time.”
But every now and then, something would change. The fog of exhaustion would lift, suddenly, without warning.
“Sometimes ye kent what it was—a story someone told, maybe, or a letter that came from someone’s wife or sister. Sometimes it came out of nowhere; no one said a thing, but ye’d wake to it, in the night, like the smell of a woman lying next to ye.”
Memory, longing . . . need. They became men touched by fire—roused from dull acceptance by the sudden searing recollection of loss.
“Everyone would go a bit mad, for a time. There would be fights, all the time. And at night, in the dark . . .”
At night, you would hear the sounds of desperation, stifled sobs or stealthy rustlings. Some men would, in the end, reach out to another—sometimes to be rebuffed with shouts and blows. Sometimes not.
I wasn’t sure what he was trying to tell me, nor what it had to do with Thomas Christie. Or, perhaps, Lord John Grey.
“Did any of them ever . . . touch you?” I asked tentatively.
“No. None of them would ever think to touch me,” he said very softly. “I was their chief. They loved me—but they wouldna think, ever, to touch me.”
He took a deep, ragged breath.
“And did you want them to?” I whispered. I could feel my own pulse begin to throb in my fingertips, against his skin.
“I hungered for it,” he said so softly I could barely hear him, close as I was. “More than food. More than sleep—though I wished most desperately for sleep, and not only for the sake of tiredness. For when I slept, sometimes I saw ye.
“But it wasna the longing for a woman—though Christ knows, that was bad enough. It was only—I wanted the touch of a hand. Only that.”
His skin had ached with need, ’til he felt it must grow transparent, and the raw soreness of his heart be seen in his chest.
He made a small rueful sound, not quite a laugh.
“Ye ken those pictures of the Sacred Heart—the same as we saw in Paris?”
I knew them—Renaissance paintings, and the vividness of stained glass glowing in the aisles of Notre Dame. The Man of Sorrows, his heart exposed and pierced, radiant with love.
“I remembered that. And I thought to myself that whoever saw that vision of Our Lord was likely a verra lonely man himself, to have understood so well.”
I lifted my hand and laid it on the small hollow in the center of his chest, very lightly. The sheet was thrown back, and his skin was cool.
He closed his eyes, sighing, and clasped my hand, hard.
“The thought of that would come to me sometimes, and I would think I kent what Jesus must feel like there—so wanting, and no one to touch Him.”
25
ASHES TO ASHES
JAMIE CHECKED HIS SADDLEBAGS once more, though he had done it so often of late that the exercise was little more than custom. Each time he opened the left-hand one, he still smiled, though. Brianna had remade it for him, stitching in loops of leather that presented his pistols, hilt up, ready to be seized in an emergency, and a clever arrangement of compartments that held handy his shot pouch, powder horn, a spare knife, a coil of fishing line, a roll of twine for a snare, a hussif with pins, needles, and thread, a packet of food, a bottle of beer, and a neatly rolled clean shirt.
On the outside of the bag was a small pouch that held what Bree was pleased to call a “first-aid kit,” though he was unsure what it was meant to be in aid of. It contained several gauze packets of a bitter-smelling tea, a tin of salve, and several strips of her adhesive plaster, none of which seemed likely to be of use in any imaginable misadventure, but did no harm.
He removed a cake of soap she had added, along with a few more unnecessary fripperies, and carefully hid them under a bucket, lest she be offended.
Just in time, too; he heard her voice, exhorting wee Roger about the inclusion of sufficient clean stockings in his bags. By the time they came round the corner of the hay barn, he had everything securely buckled up.
“Ready, then, a charaid?”
“Oh, aye.” Roger nodded, and slung the saddlebags he was carrying on his shoulder off onto the ground. He turned to Bree, who was carrying Jemmy, and kissed her briefly.
“I go with you, Daddy!” Jem exclaimed hopefully.
“Not this time, sport.”
“Wanna see Indians!”
“Later, perhaps, when ye’re bigger.”
“I can talk Indian! Uncle Ian tellt me! Wanna go!”
“Not this time,” Bree told him firmly, but he wasn’t inclined to listen, and began struggling to get down. Jamie made a small rumble in his throat, and fixed him with a quelling eye.
“Ye’ve heard your parents,” he said. Jem glowered, and stuck out his lower lip like a shelf, but ceased his fuss.
“Someday ye must tell me how ye do that,” Roger said, eyeing his offspring.
Jamie laughed, and leaned down to Jemmy. “Kiss Grandda goodbye, eh?”
Disappointment generously abandoned, Jemmy reached up and seized him round the neck. He picked the little boy up out of Brianna’s arms, hugged him, and kissed him. Jem smelled of parritch, toast, and honey, a homely warm and heavy weight in his arms.
“Be good and mind your mother, aye? And when ye’re a wee bit bigger, ye’ll come, too. Come and say farewell to Clarence; ye can tell him the words Uncle Ian taught ye.” And God willing, they’d be words suitable for a three-year-old child. Ian had a most irresponsible sense of humor.
Or perhaps, he thought, grinning to himself, I’m only recalling some o’ the things I taught Jenny’s bairns—including Ian—to say in French.
He’d already saddled and bridled Roger’s horse, and Clarence the pack mule was fully loaded. Brianna was checking the girth and stirrup leathers while Roger slung his saddlebags—more to keep herself busy than because of any need. Her lower lip was caught in her teeth; she was being careful not to seem worried, but was fooling no one.
Jamie took Jem up to pat the mule’s nose, in order to give the lass and her man a moment’s privacy. Clarence was a good sort, and suffered Jem’s enthusiastic patting and mispronounced Cherokee phrases with long-suffering tolerance, but when Jem turned in his arms toward Gideon, Jamie leaned back sharply.
“Nay, lad, ye dinna want to touch yon wicked bugger. He’ll take your hand right off.”
Gideon twitched his ears and stamped once, impatient. The big stallion was dying to get under way and have another chance at killing him.
“Why do you keep that vicious thing?” Brianna asked, seeing Gideon’s long lip wrinkle back to show his yellow teeth in anticipation. She took Jemmy from him, stepping well away from Gideon.
“What, wee Gideon? Oh, we get on. Besides, he’s half my trade goods, lass.”
“Really?” She gave the big chestnut a suspicious glance. “Are you sure you won’t start a war, giving the Indians something like him?”
“Oh, I dinna mean to give him to them,” he assured her. “Not directly, at least.”
Gideon was a bad-tempered, thrawn-headed reester of a horse, with a mouth like iron and a will to match. However, these unsociable qualities seemed most appealing to the Indians, as did the stallion’s massive chest, long wind, and stoutly muscled frame. When Quiet Air, the sachem in one of the villages, had offered him three deerskins for the chance to breed his spotted mare to Gideon, Jamie had realized suddenly that he had something here.
“’Twas the greatest good fortune that I never found the time to castrate him,” he said, slapping Gideon familiarly on the withers and dodging by reflex as the stallion whipped his head round to snap. “He earns his keep, and more, standing at stud to the Indian ponies. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked him to do that he’s not balked at.”
The lass was pink as a Christmas rose from the morning cold; she laughed at that, though, going an even deeper color.
“What’s castrate?” Jemmy inquired.
“Your mother will tell ye.” He grinned at her, ruffled Jemmy’s hair, and turned to Roger. “Ready, lad?”
Roger Mac nodded and stepped up into his stirrup, swinging aboard. He had a steady old bay gelding named Agrippa, who tended to grunt and wheeze, but was sound enough for all that, and good for a rider like Roger—competent enough, but with an abiding sense of inner reservation about horses.
Roger leaned down from the saddle for a last kiss from Brianna, and they were under way. Jamie’d taken a private—and thorough—leave of Claire earlier.
She was in the window of their bedroom, watching out to wave to them as they rode past, her hairbrush in her hand. Her hair was standing out in a great curly swash round her head, and the early-morning sun caught in it like flames in a thornbush. It gave him a sudden queer feeling to see her thus so disordered, half-naked in her shift. A sense of strong desire, despite what he’d done to her not an hour past. And something almost fear, as though he might never see her again.
Quite without thought, he glanced at his left hand, and saw the ghost of the scar at the base of his thumb, the “C” so faded that it was scarcely visible. He had not noticed it or thought of it in years, and felt suddenly as though there was not air enough to breathe.
He waved, though, and she threw him a mocking kiss, laughing. Christ, he’d marked her; he could see the dark patch of the love bite he’d left on her neck, and a hot flush of embarrassment rose in his face. He dug his heels into Gideon’s side, causing the stallion to give a squeal of displeasure and turn round to try to bite him in the leg.
With this distraction, they were safe away. He looked back only once, at the trailhead, to see her still there, framed by light. She lifted one hand, as though in benediction, and then the trees hid her from sight.