WHEN I CAME BACK upstairs next morning after a delicious breakfast featuring omelettes made with minced buffalo meat, sweet onions, and mushrooms, I found Jamie awake, though not noticeably bright-eyed.
“How are you this morning?” I asked, setting down the tray I had brought him and putting a hand on his forehead. Still warm, but no longer blazing; the fever was nearly gone.
“I wish I were deid, if only so folk would stop asking how am I?” he replied grumpily. I took his mood as an indicator of returning health, and took my hand away.
“Have you used the chamberpot yet this morning?”
He raised one eyebrow, glowering.
“Have you?”
“You know, you are perfectly impossible when you don’t feel well,” I remarked, rising to peer into the crudely glazed pot for myself. Nothing.
“Does it not occur to ye, Sassenach, that perhaps it’s yourself that’s impossible when I’m ill? If ye’re not feeding me some disgusting substance made of ground beetles and hoof-shavings, you’re pokin’ my belly and making intimate inquiries into the state of my bowels. Ahh!”
I had in fact pulled down the sheet and prodded him in the lower abdomen. No distention from a swollen bladder; his exclamation appeared to be due entirely to ticklishness. I quickly palpated the liver, but found no hardness—that was a relief.
“Have you a pain in your back?”
“I’ve a marked pain in my backside,” he said, narrowing one eye at me and folding his arms protectively across his middle. “And it’s getting worse by the moment.”
“I am trying to determine whether the snake venom has affected your kidneys,” I explained patiently, deciding to overlook this last remark. “If you can’t piss—”
“I can do that fine,” he assured me, pulling the sheet up to his chest, lest I demand proof. “Now, just leave me to my breakfast, and I’ll—”
“How do you know? You haven’t—”
“I have.” Seeing my skeptical glance at the chamberpot, he glowered under his brows, and muttered something ending in “. . . window.” I swung round to the open window, shutters open and sash raised in spite of the chilly morning air.
“You did what?”
“Well,” he defended himself, “I was standing up, and I just thought I would, that’s all.”
“Why were you standing up?”
“Oh, I thought I would.” He blinked at me, innocent as a day-old child. I left the question, going on to more important matters.
“Was there blood in—”
“What have ye brought for my breakfast?” Ignoring my clinical inquiries, he rolled to one side, and lifted the napkin draped over the tray. He looked at the bowl of bread and milk thus revealed, then turned his head, giving me a look of the most profound betrayal.
Before he could start in on further grievances, I forestalled him by sitting down on the stool beside him and demanding bluntly, “What’s wrong with Tom Christie?”
He blinked, taken by surprise.
“Is something amiss wi’ the man?”
“I wouldn’t know; I haven’t seen him.”
“Well, I havena seen him in more than twenty years myself,” he said, picking up the spoon and prodding the bread and milk suspiciously. “If he’s grown a spare head in that time, it’s news to me.”
“Ho,” I said tolerantly. “You may—and I say may—possibly have fooled Roger, but I know you.”
He looked up at that, and gave me a sidelong smile.
“Oh, aye? D’ye know I dinna care much for bread and milk?”
My heart fluttered at sight of that smile, but I maintained my dignity.
“If you’re thinking of blackmailing me into bringing you a steak, you can forget it,” I advised him. “I can wait to find out about Tom Christie, if I have to.” I stood up, shaking out my skirts as though to leave, and turned toward the door.
“Make it parritch with honey, and I’ll tell ye.”
I turned round to find him grinning at me.
“Done,” I said, and came back to the stool.
He considered for a moment, but I could see that he was only deciding how and where to begin.
“Roger told me about the Masonic lodge at Ardsmuir,” I said, to help out. “Last night.”
Jamie shot me a startled look.
“And where did wee Roger Mac find that out? Did Christie tell him?”
“No, Kenny Lindsay did. But evidently Christie gave Roger a Masonic sign of some sort when he arrived. I thought Catholics weren’t allowed to be Masons, actually.”
He raised one eyebrow.
“Aye, well. The Pope wasna in Ardsmuir prison, and I was. Though I havena heard that it’s forbidden, forbye. So wee Roger’s a Freemason, too, is he?”
“Apparently. And perhaps it isn’t forbidden, now. It will be, later.” I flapped a hand, dismissing it. “There’s something else about Christie, though, isn’t there?”
He nodded, and glanced away.
“Aye, there is,” he said quietly. “D’ye recall a Sergeant Murchison, Sassenach?”
“Vividly.” I had met the Sergeant only once, more than two years previously, in Cross Creek. The name seemed familiar in some other, more recent context, though. Then I recalled where I had heard it.
“Archie Hayes mentioned him—or them. That was it; there were two of them, twins. One of them was the man who shot Archie at Culloden, wasn’t he?”
Jamie nodded. His eyes were hooded, and I could see that he was looking back into the time he had spent in Ardsmuir.
“Aye. And to shoot a lad in cold blood was nay more than one could expect from either of them. A crueler pair I hope never to meet.” The corner of his mouth turned up, but without humor. “The only thing I ken to Stephen Bonnet’s credit is that he killed one o’ yon lurdans.”
“And the other?” I asked.
“I killed the other.”
The room seemed suddenly very quiet, as though the two of us were far removed from Fraser’s Ridge, alone together, that bald statement floating in the air between us. He was looking straight at me, blue eyes guarded, waiting to see what I would say. I swallowed.
“Why?” I asked, vaguely surprised at the calmness of my own voice.
He did look away then, shaking his head.
“A hundred reasons,” he said softly, “and none.” He rubbed absently at his wrist, as though feeling the weight of iron fetters.
“I could tell ye stories of their viciousness, Sassenach, and they would be true. They preyed upon the weak, robbing and beating—and they were the sort who took delight in cruelty for its own sake. There’s no recourse against such men, not in a prison. But I dinna say so as an excuse—for there is none.”
The prisoners at Ardsmuir were used for labor, cutting peats, quarrying and hauling stone. They worked in small groups, each group guarded by an English soldier, armed with musket and club. The musket, to prevent escape—the club, to enforce orders and ensure submission.
“It was summer. Ye’ll ken the summer in the Highlands, Sassenach—the summer dim?”
I nodded. The summer dim was the light of the Highland night, late in summer. So far to the north, the sun barely set on Midsummer’s Eve; it would disappear below the horizon, but even at midnight, the sky was pale and milky white, and the air was not dark, but seemed filled with unearthly mist.
The prison governor took advantage of the light, now and then, to work the prisoners into the late hours of the evening.
“We didna mind so much,” Jamie said. His eyes were open, but fixed on whatever he was seeing in the summer dim of memory. “It was better to be outside than in. And yet, by the evening, we would be so droukit wi’ fatigue that we could barely set one foot before the other. It was like walking in a dream.”
Both guards and men were numb with exhaustion, by the time the work of the day was done. The groups of prisoners were collected, formed up into a column, and marched back toward the prison, shuffling across the moorland, stumbling and nodding, drunk with the need to fall down and sleep.
“We were still by the quarry, when they set off; we were to load the wagon wi’ the stone-cutting tools and the last of the blocks, and follow. I remember—I heaved a great block up into the wagon bed, and stood back, panting wi’ the effort. There was a sound behind me, and I turned to see Sergeant Murchison—Billy, it was, though I didna find that out ’til later.”
The Sergeant was no more than a squat black shape in the dim, face invisible against a sky the color of an oyster’s shell.
“I wondered, now and then, if I wouldna have done it, had I seen his face.” The fingers of Jamie’s left hand stroked his wrist absently, and I realized that he still felt the weight of the irons he had worn.
The Sergeant had raised his club, poked Jamie hard in the ribs, then used it to point to a maul left lying on the ground. Then the Sergeant turned away.
“I didna think about it for a moment,” Jamie said softly. “I was on him in two steps, wi’ the chain of my fetters hard against his throat. He hadna time to make a sound.”
The wagon stood no more than ten feet from the lip of the quarry pool; there was a drop of forty feet straight down, and the water below, a hundred feet deep, black and waveless under that hollow white sky.
“I tied him to one of the blocks and threw him over, and then I went back to the wagon. The two men from my group were there, standing like statues in the dim, watching. They said nothing, nor did I. I stepped up and took the reins, they got into the back of the wagon, and I drove toward the prison. We caught up to the column before too long, and all went back together, without a word. No one missed Sergeant Murchison until the next evening, for they thought he was down in the village, off-duty. I dinna think they ever found him.”
He seemed to notice what he was doing, then, and took his hand away from his wrist.
“And the two men?” I asked softly. He nodded.
“Tom Christie and Duncan Innes.”
He sighed deeply, and stretched his arms, shifting his shoulders as though to ease the fit of his shirt—though he wore a loose nightshirt. Then he raised one hand and turned it to and fro, frowning at his wrist in the light.
“That’s odd,” he said, sounding faintly surprised.
“What is?”
“The marks—they’re gone.”
“Marks . . . from the irons?” He nodded, examining both his wrists in bemusement. The skin was fair, weathered to a pale gold, but otherwise unblemished.
“I had them for years—from the chafing, aye? I never noticed that they’d gone.”
I set a hand on his wrist, rubbing my thumb gently over the pulse where his radial artery crossed the bone.
“You didn’t have them when I found you in Edinburgh, Jamie. They’ve been gone a long time.”
He looked down at his arms, and shook his head, as though unable to believe it.
“Aye,” he said softly. “Well, so has Tom Christie.”