* * *
Through the next day, we waited, doing our chores and going through the daily routine with one ear cocked for the sound of horses in the dooryard.
“They’ll have stayed to do some business,” Jenny said, outwardly confident. But I saw her pause every time she passed the window that overlooked the lane leading to the house.
As for me, I had a hard time controlling my imagination. The letter, signed by King George, confirming Jamie’s pardon, was locked in the drawer of the desk in the laird’s study. Jamie regarded it as a humiliation, and would have burned it, but I had insisted it be kept, just in case. Now, listening for sounds through the rush of winter wind, I kept having visions of it having all been a mistake, or a hoax of some kind—of Jamie once more arrested by red-coated dragoons, taken away again to the misery of prison, and the impending danger of the hangman’s noose.
The men returned at last just before nightfall, horses laden with bags containing the salt, needles, pickling spice, and other small items that Lallybroch could not produce for itself.
I heard one of the horses whinny as it came into the stableyard, and ran downstairs, meeting Jenny on her way out through the kitchens.
Relief swept through me as I saw Jamie’s tall figure, shadowed against the barn. I ran through the yard, disregarding the light covering of snow that lingered on the ground, and flung myself into his arms.
“Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.
He took time to kiss me before replying. His face was cold against mine, and his lips tasted faintly and pleasantly of whisky.
“Mm, sausage for supper?” he said approvingly, sniffing at my hair, which smelled of kitchen smoke. “Good, I’m fair starved.”
“Bangers and mash,” I said. “Where have you been?”
He laughed, shaking out his plaid to get the blown snow off. “Bangers and mash? That’s food, is it?”
“Sausages with mashed potatoes,” I translated. “A nice traditional English dish, hitherto unknown in the benighted reaches of Scotland. Now, you bloody Scot, where in hell have you been for the last two days? Jenny and I were worried!”
“Well, we had a wee accident—” Jamie began, when he spotted the small figure of Fergus, bearing a lantern. “Och, ye’ve brought a light, then, Fergus? Good lad. Set it there, where ye won’t set fire to the straw, and then take this poor beast into her stall. When ye’ve got her settled, come along to your own supper. You’ll be able to sit to it by now, I expect?” He aimed a friendly cuff at Fergus’s ear. The boy dodged and grinned back; apparently whatever had happened in the barn yesterday had left no hard feelings.
“Jamie,” I said, in measured tones. “If you don’t stop talking about horses and sausages and tell me what sort of accident you had, I am going to kick you in the shins. Which will be very hard on my toes, because I’m only wearing slippers, but I warn you, I’ll do it anyway.”
“That’s a threat, is it?” he said, laughing. “It wasna serious, Sassenach, only that—”
“Ian!” Jenny, delayed momentarily by Maggie, had just arrived, in time to see her husband step into the circle of lanternlight. Startled by the shock in her voice, I turned to see her dart forward and put a hand to Ian’s face.
“Whatever happened to ye, man?” she said. Plainly, whatever the accident had been, Ian had borne the brunt of it. One eye was blackened and swollen half-shut, and there was a long, raw scrape down the slope of one cheekbone.
“I’m all right, mi dhu,” he said, patting Jenny gently as she embraced him, little Maggie squeezed uncomfortably between them. “Only a bit bruised here and there.”
“We were comin’ down the slope of the hill two miles outside the village, leading the horses because the footing was bad, and Ian stepped in a molehole and broke his leg,” Jamie explained.
“The wooden one,” Ian amplified. He grinned, a little sheepishly. “The mole had a bit the best o’ that encounter.”
“So we stayed at a cottage nearby long enough to carve him a new one,” Jamie ended the story. “Can we eat? The sides of my belly are flapping together.”
We went in without further ado, and Mrs. Crook and I served the supper while Jenny bathed Ian’s face with witch hazel and made anxious inquiries about other injuries.
“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “Only bruises here and there.” I had watched him coming into the house, though, and seen that his normal limp was badly exaggerated. I had a few quiet words with Jenny as we cleared away the supper plates, and once we were settled in the parlor, the contents of the saddlebags safely disposed of, she knelt on the rug beside Ian and took hold of the new leg.
“Let’s have it off, then,” she said firmly. “You’ve hurt yourself, and I want Claire to look it over. She can maybe help ye more than I can.”
The original amputation had been done with some skill, and greater luck; the army surgeon who had taken the lower leg off had been able to save the knee joint. This gave Ian a great deal more flexibility of movement than he might otherwise have had. For the moment, though, the knee joint was more a liability than an advantage.
The fall had twisted his leg cruelly; the end of the stump was blue with bruising, and lacerated where the sharp edge of the cuff had pressed through the skin. It must have been agony to set any weight on it, even had all else been normal. As it was, the knee had twisted, too, and the flesh on the inside of the joint was swollen, red and hot.
Ian’s long, good-natured face was nearly as red as the injured joint. While perfectly matter-of-fact about his disability, I knew he hated the occasional helplessness it imposed. His embarrassment at being so exposed now was likely as painful to him as my touching of his leg.
“You’ve torn a ligament through here,” I told him, tracing the swelling inside his knee with a gentle finger. “I can’t tell how bad it is, but bad enough. You’ve got fluid inside the joint; that’s why it’s swollen.”
“Can ye help it, Sassenach?” Jamie was leaning over my shoulder, frowning worriedly at the angry-looking limb.
I shook my head. “Not a lot I can do for it, beyond cold compresses to reduce the swelling.” I looked up at Ian, fixing him with my best approximation of a Mother Hildegarde look.
“What you can do,” I said, “is stay in bed. You can have whisky for the pain tomorrow; tonight, I’ll give you laudanum so you can sleep. Keep off it for a week, at least, and we’ll see how it does.”
“I canna do that!” Ian protested. “There’s the stable wall needs mending, two dikes down in the upper field, and the ploughshares to be sharpened, and—”
“And a leg to mend, too,” said Jamie, firmly. He gave Ian what I privately called his “laird’s look,” a piercing blue glare that caused most people to leap to his bidding. Ian, who had shared meals, toys, hunting expeditions, fights, and thrashings with Jamie, was a good deal less susceptible than most people.
“The hell I will,” he said flatly. His hot brown eyes met Jamie’s with a look in which pain and anger mingled with resentment—and something else I didn’t recognize. “D’ye think ye can order me?”
Jamie sat back on his heels, flushing as though he’d been slapped. He bit back several obvious retorts, finally saying quietly, “No. I wilna try to order ye. May I ask ye, though—to care for yourself?”
A long look passed between the men, containing some message I couldn’t read. At last, Ian’s shoulders slumped as he relaxed, and he nodded, with a crooked smile.
“You can ask.” He sighed, and rubbed at the scrape on his cheekbone, wincing as he touched the abraded skin. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, then held out a hand to Jamie. “Help me up, then?”
It was an awkward job, getting a man with one leg up two flights of stairs, but it was managed at last. At the bedroom door, Jamie left Ian to Jenny. As he stepped back, Ian said something soft and quick to Jamie in Gaelic. I still was not proficient in the tongue, but I thought he had said, “Be well, brother.”
Jamie paused, looking back, and smiled, the candle lighting his eyes with warmth.
“You, too, mo brathair.”
I followed Jamie down the hall to our own room. I could tell from the slump of his shoulders that he was tired, but I had a few questions I wanted to ask before he fell asleep.
“It’s only bruises here and there,” Ian had said, reassuring Jenny. It was. Here and there. Besides the bruises on his face and leg, I had seen the darkened marks that lay half-hidden under the collar of his shirt. No matter how much Ian’s intrusion had been resented, I couldn’t imagine a mole trying to strangle him in retaliation.