* * *
I closed the door of our inn room behind me and leaned against it, exhausted. It was first dark outside, and the watchmen’s cries echoed down the street.
Jamie was by the window, watching for me. He came to me at once, pulling me tight against him before I had even got my cloak off. I sagged against him, grateful for his warmth and solid strength. He scooped me up with an arm beneath my knees and carried me to the window seat.
“Have a bit of a drink, Sassenach,” he urged. “Ye look all in, and no wonder.” He took the flask from the table and mixed something that appeared to be brandy and water without the water.
I shoved a hand tiredly through my hair. It had been just after breakfast when we went to the room in Ladywalk Wynd; now it was past six o’clock. It seemed as though I had been gone for days.
“It wasn’t long, poor chap. It was as though he was only waiting to see her safely taken care of. I sent word to her aunt’s house; the aunt and two cousins came to fetch her. They’ll take care of…him.” I sipped gratefully at the brandy. It burned my throat and the fumes rose inside my head like fog on the moors, but I didn’t care.
“Well,” I said, attempting a smile, “at least we know Frank is safe, after all.”
Jamie glowered down at me, ruddy brows nearly touching each other.
“Damn Frank!” he said ferociously. “Damn all Randalls! Damn Jack Randall, and damn Mary Hawkins Randall, and damn Alex Randall—er, God rest his soul, I mean,” he amended hastily, crossing himself.
“I thought you didn’t begrudge—” I started. He glared at me.
“I lied.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me slightly, holding me at arm’s length.
“And damn you, too, Claire Randall Fraser, while I’m at it!” he said. “Damn right I begrudge! I grudge every memory of yours that doesna hold me, and every tear ye’ve shed for another, and every second you’ve spent in another man’s bed! Damn you!” He knocked the brandy glass from my hand—accidentally, I think—pulled me to him and kissed me hard.
He drew back enough to shake me again.
“You’re mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as we both shall live. You’ll no mention the man’s name to me again. D’ye hear?” He kissed me fiercely to emphasize the point. “Did ye hear me?” he asked, breaking off.
“Yes,” I said, with some difficulty. “If you’d…stop…shaking me, I might…answer you.”
Rather sheepishly, he released his grip on my shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Sassenach. It’s only…God, why did ye…well, aye, I see why…but did you have to—” I interrupted this incoherent sputtering by putting my hand behind his head and drawing him down to me.
“Yes,” I said firmly, releasing him. “I had to. But it’s over now.” I loosened the ties of my cloak and let it fall back off my shoulders to the floor. He bent to pick it up, but I stopped him.
“Jamie,” I said. “I’m tired. Will you take me to bed?”
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring down at me, eyes sunk deep with tiredness and strain.
“Aye,” he said softly, at last. “Aye, I will.”
He was silent, and rough at the start, the edges of his anger sharpening his love.
“Ooh!” I said, at one point.
“Christ, I’m sorry, mo duinne. I couldna…”
“It’s all right.” I stopped his apologies with my mouth and held him tightly, feeling the wrath ebb away as the tenderness grew between us. He didn’t break away from the kiss, but held himself motionless, gently exploring my lips, the tip of his tongue caressing, barely stroking.
I touched his tongue with my own, and held his face between my hands. He hadn’t shaved since morning, and the faint red stubble rasped pleasantly beneath my fingertips.
He lowered himself and rolled slightly to one side, so as not to crush me with his weight, and we went on, touching all along our lengths, joined in closeness, speaking in silent tongues.
Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Alex Randall lay cold in his bed, and Mary Randall alone in hers. But we were here together, and no one and nothing mattered beyond that fact.
He grasped my hips, large hands warm on my skin, and pulled me toward him, and the shudder that went through me went through him, as though we shared one flesh.
I woke in the night, still in his arms, and knew he was not asleep.
“Go back to sleep, mo duinne.” His voice was soft, low and soothing, but with a catch that made me reach up to feel the wetness on his cheeks.
“What is it, love?” I whispered. “Jamie, I do love you.”
“I know it,” he said quietly. “I do know it, my own. Let me tell ye in your sleep how much I love you. For there’s no so much I can be saying to ye while ye wake, but the same poor words, again and again. While ye sleep in my arms, I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams will know the truth of them. Go back to sleep, mo duinne.”
I turned my head, enough that my lips brushed the base of his throat, where his pulse beat slow beneath the small three-cornered scar. Then I laid my head upon his chest and gave my dreams up to his keeping.
46
TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME
There were men and their traces all around, as we made our way north, following the retreat of the Highland army. We passed small groups of men on foot, walking doggedly, heads down against the windy rain. Others lay in the ditches and under the hedgerows, too exhausted to go on. Equipment and weapons had been abandoned along the way; here a wagon lay overturned, its sacks of flour split and ruined in the wet, there a brace of small culverin stood beneath a tree, twin barrels gleaming darkly in the shadows.
The weather had been bad all the way, delaying us. It was April 13, and I rode and walked with a constant, gnawing feeling of dread beneath my heart. Lord George and the clan chieftains, the Prince and his chief advisers—all were at Culloden House, or so we had been told by one of the MacDonalds that we met along the way. He knew little more than that, and we did not detain him; the man stumbled away into the mist, moving like a zombie. Rations had been short when I was captured by the English a month gone; matters had plainly gone from bad to worse. The men we saw moved slowly, many of them staggering with exhaustion and starvation. But they moved stubbornly north, all the same, following their Prince’s orders. Moving toward the place the Scots called Drumossie Moor. Toward Culloden.
At one point, the road became too bad for the faltering ponies. They would have to be led around the outer edge of a small wood, through the wet spring heather, to where the road became passable, a half-mile beyond.
“It will be swifter to walk through the wood,” Jamie told me, taking the reins from my numbed hand. He nodded toward the small grove of pine and oak, where the sweet, cool smell of wet leaves rose from the soaked ground. “D’ye go that way, Sassenach; we’ll meet wi’ ye on the other side.”
I was too tired to argue. Putting one foot in front of the other was a distinct effort, and the effort would undoubtedly be less on the smooth layer of leaves and fallen pine needles in the wood than through the boggy, treacherous heather.
It was quiet in the wood, the whine of the wind softened by the pine boughs overhead. What rain came through the branches pattered lightly on the layers of leathery fallen oak leaves, rustling and crackled, even when wet.
He lay only a few feet from the far edge of the wood, next to a big gray boulder. The pale green lichens of the rock were the same color as his tartan, and its browns blended with the fallen leaves that had drifted half across him. He seemed so much a part of the wood that I might have stumbled over him, had I not been stopped by the patch of brilliant blue.
Soft as velvet, the strange fungus spread its cloak over the naked, cold white limbs. It followed the curve of bone and sinew, sending up small trembling fronds, like the grasses and trees of a forest, invading barren land.
It was an electric, vivid blue, stark and alien. I had never seen it, but had heard of it, from an old soldier I had nursed, who had fought in the trenches of the first world war.
“We called it corpse-candle,” he had told me. “Blue, bright blue. You never see it anywhere but on a battlefield—on dead men.” He had looked up at me, old eyes puzzled beneath the white bandage.
“I always wondered where it lives, between wars.”
In the air, perhaps, its invisible spores waiting to seize an opportunity, I thought. The color was brilliant, incongruous, bright as the woad with which this man’s ancestors had painted themselves before going forth to war.
A breeze passed through the wood, ruffling the man’s hair. It stirred and rose, silky and lifelike. There was a crunch of leaves behind me, and I started convulsively from the trance in which I had stood, staring at the corpse.
Jamie stood beside me, looking down. He said nothing; only took me by the elbow and led me from the wood, leaving the dead man behind, clothed in the saprophytic hues of war and sacrifice.