“He thinks—thought—he couldn’t?”
Jamie glanced sharply at me.
“Sassenach,” he said, “he kens damn well he can’t.”
I drew breath to protest this, but bit my lip instead, finding no immediate rebuttal.
Jamie stood up and moved restlessly about the room, picking things up and putting them down.
“Would you do such a thing?” I asked, after a bit. “In the same circumstances, I mean.”
He paused for a moment, his back to me, hand on my hairbrush.
“No,” he said softly. “But it’s a hard thing for a man to live with.”
“Well, I see that . . .” I began, slowly, but he swung round to face me. His own face was strained, filled with a weariness that had little to do with lack of sleep.
“No, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye don’t.” He spoke gently, but with such a tone of despair in his voice that tears came to my eyes.
It was as much sheer physical weakness as emotional distress, but I knew that if I gave way to it, the end would be complete soggy disintegration, and no one needed that just now. I bit my lip hard and wiped my eyes with the edge of the sheet.
I heard the thump as he knelt down beside me, and I reached out blindly for him, pulling his head against my breast. He put his arms round me and sighed deeply, his breath warm on my skin through the linen of my shift. I stroked his hair with one trembling hand, and felt him give way suddenly, all the tension going out of him like water running from a jug.
I had the oddest feeling, then—as though the strength he had clung to had now been let go . . . and was flowing into me. My tenuous grip on my own body firmed as I held his, and my heart ceased wavering, taking up instead its normal solid, tireless beating.
The tears had retreated, though they were precariously near the surface. I traced the lines of his face with my fingers, ruddy bronze and lined with sun and care; the high forehead with its thick auburn brows, and the broad planes of his cheek, the long straight nose, straight as a blade. The closed eyes, slanted and mysterious with those odd lashes of his, blond at the root, so deep an auburn at the tips as to seem almost black.
“Don’t you know?” I said very softly, tracing the small, neat line of his ear. Tiny, stiff blond hairs sprouted in a tiny whorl from the tagus, tickling my finger. “Don’t any of you know? That it’s you. Not what you can give, or do, or provide. Just you.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded, though he didn’t open his eyes.
“I know. I said that to him, to Fergus,” he said very softly. “Or at least I think I did. I said a terrible lot of things.”
They had knelt together by the spring, embracing, wet with blood and water, locked together as though he could hold Fergus to the earth, to his family, by force of will alone, and he had no notion at all what he had said, lost in the passion of the moment—until the end.
“You must continue, for their sakes—though you would not for your own,” he had whispered, Fergus’s face pressed into his shoulder, the black hair wet with sweat and water, cold against his cheek. “Tu comprends, mon enfant, mon fils? Comprends-tu?”
I felt his throat move as he swallowed.
“See, I kent ye were dying,” he said very softly. “I was sure ye’d be gone when I came back to the house, and I should be alone. I wasna speaking to Fergus then, I think, so much as to myself.”
He raised his head then, and looked at me through a blur of tears and laughter.
“Oh, God, Claire,” he said, “I would have been so angry, if ye’d died and left me!”
I wanted to laugh or cry, or both, myself—and had I still harbored regrets regarding the loss of eternal peace, I would have surrendered them now without hesitation.
“I didn’t,” I said, and touched his lip. “I won’t. Or at least I’ll try not.” I slid my hand behind his head and drew him back to me. He was a good deal larger and heavier than Henri-Christian, but I felt I could hold him forever, if necessary.
It was early afternoon, and the light just beginning to shift, slanting in through the tops of the west-facing windows so that the room filled with a clean, bright light that glowed on Jamie’s hair and the worn creamy linen of his shirt. I could feel the knobs at the top of his spine, and the yielding flesh in the narrow channel between shoulder blade and backbone.
“Where will you send them?” I asked, and tried to smooth the whorled hair of the cowlick on his crown.
“To Cross Creek, maybe—or to Wilmington,” he replied. His eyes were half-closed, watching the shadows of leaves flicker on the side of the armoire he had built me. “Wherever seems best for the printing trade.”
He shifted a little, tightening his grip on my buttocks, then frowned.
“Christ, Sassenach, ye havena got any bum left at all!”
“Well, never mind,” I said with resignation. “I’m sure that will grow back soon enough.”