* * *
“Land! It’s land!” The call came at last, five days later, in a voice rendered so hoarse by wind and thirst that it was no more than a faint croak, but full of joy, nonetheless. I dashed up on deck to see, my feet slipping on the ladder rungs. Everyone was hanging over the rail, looking at the humped black shape on the horizon. It was far off, but undeniably land, solid and distinct.
“Where do you think we are?” I tried to say, but my voice was so hoarse, the words came out in a tiny whisper, and no one heard. It didn’t matter; if we were headed straight for the naval barracks at Antigua, I didn’t care.
The waves were running in huge, smooth swells, like the backs of whales. The wind was gusting now, and Innes called for the helmsman to bring the bow another point nearer the wind.
I could see a line of large birds flying, a stately procession skimming down the distant shoreline. Pelicans, searching the shallows for fish, with the sun gleaming on their wings.
I tugged at Jamie’s sleeve and pointed at them.
“Look—” I began, but got no further. There was a sharp crack! and the world exploded in black and fire. I came to in the water. Dazed and half-choked, I floundered and fought in a world of dark green. Something was wrapped about my legs, dragging me down.
I flailed wildly, kicking to free my leg of the deadly grip. Something floated past my head, and I grabbed for it. Wood, blessed wood, something to hold onto in the surging waves.
A dark shape sleeked by like a seal beneath the water, and a red head bobbed up six feet away, gasping.
“Hold on!” Jamie said. He reached me with two strokes, and ducking under the piece of wood I held, dived down. I felt a tugging at my leg, a sharp pain, and then the dragging tension eased. Jamie’s head popped up again, across the spar. He grasped my wrists and hung there, gulping air, as the rolling swell carried us, up and down.
I couldn’t see the ship anywhere; had it sunk? A wave broke over my head, and Jamie disappeared temporarily. I shook my head, blinking, and he was there again. He smiled at me, a savage grin of effort, and his grip on my wrists tightened harder.
“Hold on!” he rasped again, and I did. The wood was harsh and splintery under my hands, but I clung for all I was worth. We drifted, half-blinded by spray, spinning like a bit of flotsam, so that sometimes I saw the distant shore, sometimes nothing but the open sea from which we had come. And when the waves washed over us, I saw nothing but water.
There was something wrong with my leg; a strange numbness, punctuated with flashes of sharp pain. The vision of Murphy’s peg and the razor-grin of an openmouthed shark drifted through my mind; had my leg been taken by some toothy beast? I thought of my tiny hoard of warm blood, streaming from the stump of a bitten limb, draining away into the cold vastness of the sea, and I panicked, trying to snatch my hand from Jamie’s grasp in order to reach down and see for myself.
He snarled something unintelligible at me and held on to my wrists like grim death. After a moment of frenzied thrashing, reason returned, and I calmed myself, thinking that if my leg were indeed gone, I would have lost consciousness by now.
At that, I was beginning to lose consciousness. My vision was growing gray at the edges, and floating bright spots covered Jamie’s face. Was I really bleeding to death, or was it only cold and shock? It hardly seemed to matter, I thought muzzily; the effect was the same.
A sense of lassitude and utter peace stole gradually over me. I couldn’t feel my feet or legs, and only Jamie’s crushing grip on my hands reminded me of their existence. My head went under water, and I had to remind myself to hold my breath.
The wave subsided and the wood rose slightly, bringing my nose above water. I breathed, and my vision cleared slightly. A foot away was the face of Jamie Fraser, hair plastered to his head, wet features contorted against the spray.
“Hold on!” he roared. “Hold on, God damn you!”
I smiled gently, barely hearing him. The sense of great peace was lifting me, carrying me beyond the noise and chaos. There was no more pain. Nothing mattered. Another wave washed over me, and this time I forgot to hold my breath.
The choking sensation roused me briefly, long enough to see the flash of terror in Jamie’s eyes. Then my vision went dark again.
“Damn you, Sassenach!” his voice said, from a very great distance. His voice was choked with passion. “Damn you! I swear if ye die on me, I’ll kill you!”
* * *
I was dead. Everything around me was a blinding white, and there was a soft, rushing noise like the wings of angels. I felt peaceful and bodiless, free of terror, free of rage, filled with quiet happiness. Then I coughed.
I wasn’t bodiless, after all. My leg hurt. It hurt a lot. I became gradually aware that a good many other things hurt, too, but my left shin took precedence in no uncertain terms. I had the distinct impression that the bone had been removed and replaced with a red-hot poker.
At least the leg was demonstrably there. When I cracked my eyes open to look, the haze of pain that floated over my leg seemed almost visible, though perhaps that was only a product of the general fuzziness in my head. Whether mental or physical in origin, the general effect was of a sort of whirling whiteness, shot with flickers of a brighter light. Watching it hurt my eyes, so I shut them again.
“Thank God, you’re awake!” said a relieved-sounding Scottish voice near my ear.
“No I’m not,” I said. My own voice emerged as a salt-crusted croak, rusty with swallowed seawater. I could feel seawater in my sinuses, too, which gave my head an unpleasant gurgling feel. I coughed again, and my nose began to run profusely. Then I sneezed.
“Eugh!” I said, in complete revulsion at the resultant cascade of slime over my upper lip. My hand seemed far off and insubstantial, but I made the effort to raise it, swiping clumsily at my face.
“Be still, Sassenach; I’ll take care of ye.” There was a definite note of amusement in the voice, which irritated me enough to open my eyes again. I caught a brief glimpse of Jamie’s face, intent on mine, before vision vanished once again in the folds of an immense white handkerchief.
He wiped my face thoroughly, ignoring my strangled noises of protest and impending suffocation, then held the cloth to my nose.
“Blow,” he said.
I did as he said. Rather to my surprise, it helped quite a lot. I could think more or less coherently, now that my head was unclogged.
Jamie smiled down at me. His hair was rumpled and stiff with dried salt, and there was a wide abrasion on his temple, an angry dark red against the bronzed skin. He seemed not to be wearing a shirt, but had a blanket of some kind draped about his shoulders.
“Do ye feel verra bad?” he asked.
“Horrible,” I croaked in reply. I was also beginning to be annoyed at being alive, after all, and being required to take notice of things again. Hearing the rasp in my voice, Jamie reached for a jug of water on the table by my bed.
I blinked in confusion, but it really was a bed, not a berth or a hammock. The linen sheets contributed to the overwhelming impression of whiteness that had first engulfed me. This was reinforced by the whitewashed walls and ceiling, and the long white muslin draperies that bellied in like sails, rustling in the breeze from the open windows.
The flickering light came from reflections that shimmered over the ceiling; apparently there was water close by outside, and sun shining on it. It seemed altogether cozier than Davy Jones’s locker. Still, I felt a brief moment of intense regret for the sense of infinite peace. I had experienced in the heart of the wave—a regret made more keen by the slight movement that sent a bolt of white agony up my leg.
“I think your leg is broken, Sassenach,” Jamie told me unnecessarily. “Ye likely shouldna move it much.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I said, through gritted teeth. “Where in bloody hell are we?”
He shrugged briefly. “I dinna ken. It’s a fair-sized house, is all I could say. I wasna taking much note when they brought us in. One man said the place is called Les Perles.” He held the cup to my lips and I swallowed gratefully.
“What happened?” So long as I was careful not to move, the pain in my leg was bearable. Automatically, I placed my fingers under the angle of my jaw to check my pulse; reassuringly strong. I wasn’t in shock; my leg couldn’t be badly fractured, much as it hurt.
Jamie rubbed a hand over his face. He looked very tired, and I noticed that his hand trembled with fatigue. There was a large bruise on his cheek, and a line of dried blood where something had scratched the side of his neck.
“The topmast snapped, I think. One of the spars fell and knocked ye overboard. When ye hit the water, ye sank like a stone, and I dived in after you. I got hold of you—and the spar, too, thank God. Ye had a bit of rigging tangled round your leg, dragging ye down, but I managed to get that off.” He heaved a deep sigh, and rubbed his head.
“I just held to ye; and after a time, I felt sand under my feet. I carried ye ashore, and a bit later, some men found us and brought us here. That’s all.” He shrugged.
I felt cold, despite the warm breeze coming in through the windows.
“What happened to the ship? And the men? Ian? Lawrence?”
“Safe, I think. They couldna reach us, with the mast broken—by the time they’d rigged a makeshift sail, we were long gone.” He coughed roughly, and rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. “But they’re safe; the men who found us said they’d seen a small ketch go aground on a mud flat a quarter-mile south of here; they’ve gone down to salvage and bring back the men.”
He took a swallow of water, swished it about his mouth, and going to the window, spat it out.
“I’ve sand in my teeth,” he said, grimacing, as he returned. “And my ears. And my nose, and the crack of my arse, too, I shouldna wonder.”
I reached out and took his hand again. His palm was heavily calloused, but still showed the tender swelling of rising blisters, with shreds of ragged skin and raw flesh, where earlier blisters had burst and bled.
“How long were we in the water?” I asked, gently tracing the lines of his swollen palm. The tiny “C” at the base of his thumb was faded almost to invisibility, but I could still feel it under my finger. “Just how long did you hold on?”
“Long enough,” he said simply.
He smiled a little, and held my hand more tightly, despite the soreness of his own. It dawned on me suddenly that I wasn’t wearing anything; the linen sheets were smooth and cool on my bare skin, and I could see the swell of my nipples, rising under the thin fabric.
“What happened to my clothes?”
“I couldna hold ye up against the drag of your skirts, so I ripped them off,” he explained. “What was left didna seem worth saving.”
“I don’t suppose so,” I said slowly, “but Jamie—what about you? Where’s your coat?”
He shrugged, then let his shoulders drop, and smiled ruefully.
“At the bottom of the sea with my shoon, I expect,” he said. And the pictures of Willie and Brianna there, too.
“Oh, Jamie. I’m so sorry.” I reached for his hand and held it tightly. He looked away, and blinked once or twice.
“Aye, well,” he said softly. “I expect I will remember them.” He shrugged again, with a lopsided smile. “And if not, I can look in the glass, no?” I gave a laugh that was half a sob; he swallowed painfully, but went on smiling.
He glanced down at his tattered breeches then, and seeming to think of something, leaned back and worked a hand into the pocket.
“I didna come away completely empty-handed,” he said, pulling a wry face. “Though I would as soon it had been the pictures I kept, and lost these.”
He opened his hand, and I saw the gleam and glitter in his ruined palm. Stones of the first quality, cut and faceted, suitable for magic. An emerald, a ruby—male, I supposed—a great fiery opal, a turquoise blue as the sky I could see out the window, a golden stone like sun trapped in honey, and the strange crystal purity of Geilie’s black diamond.
“You have the adamant,” I said, touching it gently. It was still cool to the touch, in spite of being worn so close to his body.
“I have,” he said, but he was looking at me, not at the stone, a slight smile on his face. “What is it an adamant gives ye? The knowledge of joy in all things?”
“So I was told.” I lifted my hand to his face and stroked it lightly, feeling hard bone and lively flesh, warm to the touch, and joyful to behold above all things.
“We have Ian,” I said softly. “And each other.”
“Aye, that’s true.” The smile reached his eyes then. He dropped the stones in a glittering heap on the table and leaned back in his chair, cradling my hand between his.
I relaxed, feeling a warm peace begin to steal over me, in spite of the aches and scrapes and the pain in my leg. We were alive, safe and together, and very little else mattered; surely not clothes, nor a fractured tibia. Everything would be managed in time—but not now. For now, it was enough only to breathe, and look at Jamie.
We sat in a peaceful silence for some time, watching the sunlit curtains and the open sky. It might have been ten minutes later, or as much as an hour, when I heard the sound of light footsteps outside, and a delicate rap at the door.
“Come in,” Jamie said. He sat up straighter, but didn’t let go of my hand.
The door opened, and a woman stepped in, her pleasant face lit by welcome, tinged with curiosity.
“Good morning,” she said, a little shyly. “I must beg your pardon, not to have waited upon you before; I was in the town, and learned of your—arrival”—she smiled at the word—“only when I returned, just now.”
“We must thank ye, Madame, most sincerely, for the kind treatment afforded to us,” Jamie said. He rose and bowed formally to her, but kept hold of my hand. “Your servant, ma’am. Have ye word of our companions?”
She blushed slightly, and bobbed a curtsy in reply to his bow. She was young, only in her twenties, and seemed unsure quite how to conduct herself under the circumstances. She had light brown hair, pulled back in a knot, fair pink skin, and what I thought was a faint West Country accent.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “My servants brought them back from the ship; they’re in the kitchen now, being fed.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning it. “That’s terribly kind of you.”
She blushed rosily with embarrassment.
“Not at all,” she murmured, then glanced shyly at me. “I must beg your pardon for my lack of manners, ma’am,” she said. “I am remiss in not introducing myself. I am Patsy Olivier—Mrs. Joseph Olivier, that is.” She looked expectantly from me to Jamie, clearly expecting reciprocation.
Jamie and I exchanged a glance. Where, exactly, were we? Mrs. Olivier was English, that was clear enough. Her husband’s name was French. The bay outside gave no clue; this could be any of the Windward Isles—Barbados, the Bahamas, the Exumas, Andros—even the Virgin Islands. Or—the thought struck me—we might have been blown south by the hurricane, and not north; in which case, this might even be Antigua—in the lap of the British Navy!—or Martinique, or the Grenadines…I looked at Jamie and shrugged.
Our hostess was still waiting, glancing expectantly from one to the other of us. Jamie tightened his hold on my hand and drew a deep breath.
“I trust ye willna think this an odd question, Mistress Olivier—but could ye tell me where we are?”
Mrs. Olivier’s brows rose to the edge of her widow’s peak, and she blinked in astonishment.
“Well…yes,” she said. “We call it Les Perles.”
“Thank you,” I put in, seeing Jamie taking breath to try again, “but what we mean is—what island is this?”
A broad smile of understanding broke out on her round pink face.
“Oh, I see!” she said. “Of course, you were cast away by the storm. My husband was saying last night that he’d never seen such a dreadful blow at this time of year. What a mercy it is that you were saved! But you came from the islands to the south, then?”
The south. This couldn’t be Cuba. Might we have come as far as St. Thomas, or even Florida? We exchanged a quick glance, and I squeezed Jamie’s hand. I could feel the pulse beating in his wrist.
Mrs. Olivier smiled indulgently. “You are not on an island at all. You are on the mainland; in the Colony of Georgia.”
“Georgia,” Jamie said. “America?” He sounded slightly stunned, and no wonder. We had been blown at least six hundred miles by the storm.
“America,” I said softly. “The New World.” The pulse beneath my fingers had quickened, echoing my own. A new world. Refuge. Freedom.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Olivier, plainly having no idea what the news meant to us, but still smiling kindly from one to the other. “It is America.”
Jamie straightened his shoulders and smiled back at her. The clean bright air stirred his hair like kindling flames.
“In that case, ma’am,” he said, “my name is Jamie Fraser.” He looked then at me, eyes blue and brilliant as the sky behind him, and his heart beat strong in the palm of my hand.
“And this is Claire,” he said. “My wife.”