* * *
“I didna expect to be doing this for him for a good two or three years yet,” Jamie remarked, holding his nephew’s head with an expert hand as Young Ian retched painfully into the spittoon I was holding.
“Aye, well, he’s always been forward,” Ian answered resignedly. “Learnt to walk before he could stand, and was forever tumblin’ into the fire or the washpot or the pigpen or the cowbyre.” He patted the skinny, heaving back. “There, lad, let it come.”
A little more, and the lad was deposited in a wilted heap on the sofa, there to recover from the effects of smoke, emotion, and too much porter under the censoriously mingled gaze of uncle and father.
“Where’s that damn tea I sent for?” Jamie reached impatiently for the bell, but I stopped him. The brothel’s domestic arrangements were evidently still disarranged from the excitements of the morning.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll go down and fetch it.” I scooped up the spittoon and carried it out with me at arm’s length, hearing Ian say behind me, in a reasonable tone of voice, “Look, fool—”
I found my way to the kitchen with no difficulty, and obtained the necessary supplies. I hoped Jamie and Ian would give the boy a few minutes’ respite; not only for his own sake, but so that I would miss nothing of his story.
I had clearly missed something; when I returned to the small sitting room, an air of constraint hung over the room like a cloud, and Young Ian glanced up and then quickly away to avoid my eye. Jamie was his usual imperturbable self, but the elder Ian looked almost as flushed and uneasy as his son. He hurried forward to take the tray from me, murmuring thanks, but would not meet my eye.
I raised one eyebrow at Jamie, who gave me a slight smile and a shrug. I shrugged back and picked up one of the bowls on the tray.
“Bread and milk,” I said, handing it to Young Ian, who at once looked happier.
“Hot tea,” I said, handing the pot to his father.
“Whisky,” I said, handing the bottle to Jamie, “and cold tea for the burns.” I whisked the lid off the last bowl, in which a number of napkins were soaking in cold tea.
“Cold tea?” Jamie’s ruddy brows lifted. “Did the cook have no butter?”
“You don’t put butter on burns,” I told him. “Aloe juice, or the juice of a plantain or plantago, but the cook didn’t have any of that. Cold tea is the best we could manage.”
I poulticed Young Ian’s blistered hands and forearms and blotted his scarlet face gently with the tea-soaked napkins while Jamie and Ian did the honors with teapot and whisky bottle, after which we all sat down, somewhat restored, to hear the rest of Ian’s story.
“Well,” he began, “I walked about the city for a bit, tryin’ to think what best to do. And finally my head cleared a bit, and I reasoned that if the man I’d been following was goin’ from tavern to tavern down the High Street, if I went to the other end and started up the street, I could maybe find him that way.”
“That was a bright thought,” Jamie said, and Ian nodded approvingly, the frown lifting a bit from his face. “Did ye find him?”
Young Ian nodded, slurping a bit. “I did, then.”
Running down the Royal Mile nearly to the Palace of Holyrood at the foot, he had toiled his way painstakingly up the street, stopping at each tavern to inquire for the man with the pigtail and one eye. There was no word of his quarry anywhere below the Canongate, and he was beginning to despair of his idea, when suddenly he had seen the man himself, sitting in the taproom of the Holyrood Brewery.
Presumably this stop was for respite, rather than information, for the seaman was sitting at his ease, drinking beer. Young Ian had darted behind a hogshead in the yard, and remained there, watching, until at length the man rose, paid his score, and made his leisurely way outside.
“He didna go to any more taverns,” the boy reported, wiping a stray drop of milk off his chin. “He went straight to Carfax Close, to the printshop.”
Jamie said something in Gaelic under his breath. “Did he? And what then?”
“Well, he found the shop shut up, of course. When he saw the door was locked, he looked careful like, up at the windows, as though he was maybe thinking of breaking in. But then I saw him look about, at all the folk coming and going—it was a busy time of day, wi’ all the folk coming to the chocolate shop. So he stood on the stoop a moment, thinking, and then he set off back up the close—I had to duck into the tailor’s shop on the corner so as not to be seen.”
The man had paused at the entrance of the close, then, making up his mind, had turned to the right, gone down a few paces, and disappeared into a small alley.
“I kent as how the alley led up to the court at the back of the close,” Young Ian explained. “So I saw at once what he meant to be doing.”
“There’s a wee court at the back of the close,” Jamie explained, seeing my puzzled look. “It’s for rubbish and deliveries and such—but there’s a back door out of the printshop opens onto it.”
Young Ian nodded, putting down his empty bowl. “Aye. I thought it must be that he meant to get into the place. And I thought of the new pamphlets.”
“Jesus,” Jamie said. He looked a little pale.
“Pamphlets?” Ian raised his brows at Jamie. “What kind of pamphlets?”
“The new printing for Mr. Gage,” Young Ian explained.
Ian still looked as blank as I felt.
“Politics,” Jamie said bluntly. “An argument for repeal of the last Stamp Act—with an exhortation to civil opposition—by violence, if necessary. Five thousand of them, fresh-printed, stacked in the back room. Gage was to come round and get them in the morning, tomorrow.”
“Jesus,” Ian said. He had gone even paler than Jamie, at whom he stared in a sort of mingled horror and awe. “Have ye gone straight out o’ your mind?” he inquired. “You, wi’ not an inch on your back unscarred? Wi’ the ink scarce dry on your pardon for treason? You’re mixed up wi’ Tom Gage and his seditious society, and got my son involved as well?”
His voice had been rising throughout, and now he sprang to his feet, fists clenched.
“How could ye do such a thing, Jamie—how? Have we not suffered enough for your actions, Jenny and me? All through the war and after—Christ, I’d think you’d have your fill of prisons and blood and violence!”
“I have,” Jamie said shortly. “I’m no part of Gage’s group. But my business is printing, aye? He paid for those pamphlets.”
Ian threw up his hands in a gesture of vast irritation. “Oh, aye! And that will mean a great deal when the Crown’s agents arrest ye and take ye to London to be hangit! If those things were to be found on your premises—” Struck by a sudden thought, he stopped and turned to his son.
“Oh, that was it?” he asked. “Ye kent what those pamphlets were—that’s why ye set them on fire?”
Young Ian nodded, solemn as a young owl.
“I couldna move them in time,” he said. “Not five thousand. The man—the seaman—he’d broke out the back window, and he was reachin’ in for the doorlatch.”
Ian whirled back to face Jamie.
“Damn you!” he said violently. “Damn ye for a reckless, harebrained fool, Jamie Fraser! First the Jacobites, and now this!”
Jamie had flushed up at once at Ian’s words, and his face grew darker at this.
“Am I to blame for Charles Stuart?” he said. His eyes flashed angrily and he set his teacup down with a thump that sloshed tea and whisky over the polished tabletop. “Did I not try all I could to stop the wee fool? Did I not give up everything in that fight—everything, Ian! My land, my freedom, my wife—to try to save us all?” He glanced at me briefly as he spoke, and I caught one very small quick glimpse of just what the last twenty years had cost him.
He turned back to Ian, his brows lowering as he went on, voice growing hard.
“And as for what I’ve cost your family—what have ye profited, Ian? Lallybroch belongs to wee James now, no? To your son, not mine!”
Ian flinched at that. “I never asked—” he began.
“No, ye didn’t. I’m no accusing ye, for God’s sake! But the fact’s there—Lallybroch’s no mine anymore, is it? My father left it to me, and I cared for it as best I could—took care o’ the land and the tenants—and ye helped me, Ian.” His voice softened a bit. “I couldna have managed without you and Jenny. I dinna begrudge deeding it to Young Jamie—it had to be done. But still…” He turned away for a moment, head bowed, broad shoulders knotted tight beneath the linen of his shirt.
I was afraid to move or speak, but I caught Young Ian’s eye, filled with infinite distress. I put a hand on his skinny shoulder for mutual reassurance, and felt the steady pounding of the pulse in the tender flesh above his collarbone. He set his big, bony paw on my hand and held on tight.
Jamie turned back to his brother-in-law, struggling to keep his voice and temper under control. “I swear to ye, Ian, I didna let the lad be put in danger. I kept him out of the way so much as I possibly could—didna let the shoremen see him, or let him go out on the boats wi’ Fergus, hard as he begged me.” He glanced at Young Ian and his expression changed, to an odd mixture of affection and irritation.
“I didna ask him to come to me, Ian, and I told him he must go home again.”
“Ye didna make him go, though, did you?” The angry color was fading from Ian’s face, but his soft brown eyes were still narrow and bright with fury. “And ye didna send word, either. For God’s sake, Jamie, Jenny hasna slept at night anytime this month!”
Jamie’s lips pressed tight. “No,” he said, letting the words escape one at a time. “No. I didn’t. I—” He glanced at the boy again, and shrugged uncomfortably, as though his shirt had grown suddenly too tight.
“No,” he said again. “I meant to take him home myself.”
“He’s old enough to travel by himself,” Ian said shortly. “He got here alone, no?”
“Aye. It wasna that.” Jamie turned aside restlessly, picking up a teacup and rolling it to and fro between his palms. “No, I meant to take him, so that I could ask your permission—yours and Jenny’s—for the lad to come live wi’ me for a time.”
Ian uttered a short, sarcastic laugh. “Oh, aye! Give our permission for him to be hangit or transported alongside you, eh?”
The anger flashed across Jamie’s features again as he looked up from the cup in his hands.
“Ye know I wouldna let any harm come to him,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, Ian, I care for the lad as though he were my own son, and well ye ken it, too!”
Ian’s breath was coming fast; I could hear it from my place behind the sofa. “Oh, I ken it well enough,” he said, staring hard into Jamie’s face. “But he’s not your son, aye? He’s mine.”
Jamie stared back for a long moment, then reached out and gently set the teacup back on the table. “Aye,” he said quietly. “He is.”
Ian stood for a moment, breathing hard, then wiped a hand carelessly across his forehead, pushing back the thick dark hair.
“Well, then,” he said. He took one or two deep breaths, and turned to his son.
“Come along, then,” he said. “I’ve a room at Halliday’s.”
Young Ian’s bony fingers tightened on mine. His throat worked, but he didn’t move to rise from his seat.
“No, Da,” he said. His voice quivered, and he blinked hard, not to cry. “I’m no going wi’ ye.”
Ian’s face went quite pale, with a deep red patch over the angular cheekbones, as though someone had slapped him hard on both cheeks.
“Is that so?” he said.
Young Ian nodded, swallowing. “I—I’ll go wi’ ye in the morning, Da; I’ll go home wi’ ye. But not now.”
Ian looked at his son for a long moment without speaking. Then his shoulders slumped, and all the tension went out of his body.
“I see,” he said quietly. “Well, then. Well.”
Without another word, he turned and left, closing the door very carefully behind him. I could hear the awkward thump of his wooden leg on each step, as he made his way down the stair. There was a brief sound of shuffling as he reached the bottom, then Bruno’s voice in farewell, and the thud of the main door shutting. And then there was no sound in the room but the hiss of the hearthfire behind me.
The boy’s shoulder was shaking under my hand, and he was holding tighter than ever to my fingers, crying without making a sound.
Jamie came slowly to sit beside him, his face full of troubled helplessness.
“Ian, oh, wee Ian,” he said. “Christ, laddie, ye shouldna have done that.”
“I had to.” Ian gasped and gave a sudden snuffle, and I realized that he had been holding his breath. He turned a scorched countenance on his uncle, raw features contorted in anguish.
“I didna want to hurt Da,” he said. “I didn’t!”
Jamie patted his knee absently. “I know, laddie,” he said, “but to say such a thing to him—”
“I couldna tell him, though, and I had to tell you, Uncle Jamie!”
Jamie glanced up, suddenly alert at his nephew’s tone.
“Tell me? Tell me what?”
“The man. The man wi’ the pigtail.”
“What about him?”
Young Ian licked his lips, steeling himself.
“I think I kilt him,” he whispered.
Startled, Jamie glanced at me, then back at Young Ian.
“How?” he asked.
“Well…I lied a bit,” Ian began, voice trembling. The tears were still welling in his eyes, but he brushed them aside. “When I went into the printshop—I had the key ye gave me—the man was already inside.”
The seaman had been in the backmost room of the shop, where the stacks of newly printed orders were kept, along with the stocks of fresh ink, the blotting papers used to clean the press, and the small forge where worn slugs were melted down and recast into fresh type.
“He was taking some o’ the pamphlets from the stack, and putting them inside his jacket,” Ian said, gulping. “When I saw him, I screeched at him to put them back, and he whirled round at me wi’ a pistol in his hand.”
The pistol had discharged, scaring Young Ian badly, but the ball had gone wild. Little daunted, the seaman had rushed at the boy, raising the pistol to club him instead.
“There was no time to run, or to think,” he said. He had let go my hand by now, and his fingers twisted together upon his knee. “I reached out for the first thing to hand and threw it.”
The first thing to hand had been the lead-dipper, the long-handled copper ladle used to pour molten lead from the melting pot into the casting molds. The forge had been still alight, though well-banked, and while the melting pot held no more than a small puddle, the scalding drops of lead had flown from the dipper into the seaman’s face.
“God, how he screamed!” A strong shudder ran through Young Ian’s slender frame, and I came round the end of the sofa to sit next to him and take both his hands.
The seaman had reeled backward, clawing at his face, and upset the small forge, knocking live coals everywhere.
“That was what started the fire,” the boy said. “I tried to beat it out, but it caught the edge of the fresh paper, and all of a sudden, something went whoosh! in my face, and it was as though the whole room was alight.”
“The barrels of ink, I suppose,” Jamie said, as though to himself. “The powder’s dissolved in alcohol.”
The sliding piles of flaming paper fell between Young Ian and the back door, a wall of flame that billowed black smoke and threatened to collapse upon him. The seaman, blinded and screaming like a banshee, had been on his hands and knees between the boy and the door into the front room of the printshop and safety.
“I—I couldna bear to touch him, to push him out o’ the way,” he said, shuddering again.
Losing his head completely, he had run up the stairs instead, but then found himself trapped as the flames, racing through the back room and drawing up the stair like a chimney, rapidly filled the upper room with blinding smoke.
“Did ye not think to climb out the trapdoor onto the roof?” Jamie asked.
Young Ian shook his head miserably. “I didna ken it was there.”
“Why was it there?” I asked curiously.
Jamie gave me the flicker of a smile. “In case of need. It’s a foolish fox has but one exit to his bolthole. Though I must say, it wasna fire I was thinking of when I had it made.” He shook his head, ridding himself of the distraction.
“But ye think the man didna escape the fire?” he asked.
“I dinna see how he could,” Young Ian answered, beginning to sniffle again. “And if he’s dead, then I killed him. I couldna tell Da I was a m-mur—mur—” He was crying again, too hard to get the word out.
“You’re no a murderer, Ian,” Jamie said firmly. He patted his nephew’s shaking shoulder. “Stop now, it’s all right—ye havena done wrong, laddie. Ye haven’t, d’ye hear?”
The boy gulped and nodded, but couldn’t stop crying or shaking. At last I put my arms around him, turned him and pulled his head down onto my shoulder, patting his back and making the sort of small soothing noises one makes to little children.
He felt very odd in my arms; nearly as big as a full-grown man, but with fine, light bones, and so little flesh on them that it was like holding a skeleton. He was talking into the depths of my bosom, his voice so disjointed by emotion and muffled by fabric that it was difficult to make out the words.
“…mortal sin…” he seemed to be saying, “…damned to hell…couldna tell Da…afraid…canna go home ever…”
Jamie raised his brows at me, but I only shrugged helplessly, smoothing the thick, bushy hair on the back of the boy’s head. At last Jamie leaned forward, took him firmly by the shoulders and sat him up.
“Look ye, Ian,” he said. “No, look—look at me!”
By dint of supreme effort, the boy straightened his drooping neck and fixed brimming, red-rimmed eyes on his uncle’s face.
“Now then.” Jamie took hold of his nephew’s hands and squeezed them lightly. “First—it’s no a sin to kill a man that’s trying to kill you. The Church allows ye to kill if ye must, in defense of yourself, your family, or your country. So ye havena committed mortal sin, and you’re no damned.”
“I’m not?” Young Ian sniffed mightily, and mopped at his face with a sleeve.
“No, you’re not.” Jamie let the hint of a smile show in his eyes. “We’ll go together and call on Father Hayes in the morning, and ye’ll make your confession and be absolved then, but he’ll tell ye the same as I have.”
“Oh.” The syllable held profound relief, and Young Ian’s scrawny shoulders rose perceptibly, as though a burden had rolled off of them.
Jamie patted his nephew’s knee again. “For the second thing, ye needna fear telling your father.”
“No?” Young Ian had accepted Jamie’s word on the state of his soul without hesitation, but sounded profoundly dubious about this secular opinion.
“Well, I’ll not say he’ll no be upset,” Jamie added fairly. “In fact, I expect it will turn the rest of his hair white on the spot. But he’ll understand. He isna going to cast ye out or disown ye, if that’s what you’re scairt of.”
“You think he’ll understand?” Young Ian looked at Jamie with eyes in which hope battled with doubt. “I—I didna think he…has my Da ever killed a man?” he asked suddenly.
Jamie blinked, taken aback by the question. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose—I mean, he’s fought in battle, but I—to tell ye the truth, Ian, I dinna ken.” He looked a little helplessly at his nephew.
“It’s no the sort of thing men talk much about, aye? Except sometimes soldiers, when they’re deep in drink.”
Young Ian nodded, absorbing this, and sniffed again, with a horrid gurgling noise. Jamie, groping hastily in his sleeve for a handkerchief, looked up suddenly, struck by a thought.
“That’s why ye said ye must tell me, but not your Da? Because ye knew I’ve killed men before?”
His nephew nodded, searching Jamie’s face with troubled, trusting eyes. “Aye. I thought…I thought ye’d know what to do.”
“Ah.” Jamie drew a deep breath, and exchanged a glance with me. “Well…” His shoulders braced and broadened, and I could see him accept the burden Young Ian had laid down. He sighed.
“What ye do,” he said, “is first to ask yourself if ye had a choice. You didn’t, so put your mind at ease. Then ye go to confession, if ye can; if not, say a good Act of Contrition—that’s good enough, when it’s no a mortal sin. Ye harbor no fault, mind,” he said earnestly, “but the contrition is because ye greatly regret the necessity that fell on ye. It does sometimes, and there’s no preventing it.
“And then say a prayer for the soul of the one you’ve killed,” he went on, “that he may find rest, and not haunt ye. Ye ken the prayer called Soul Peace? Use that one, if ye have leisure to think of it. In a battle, when there is no time, use Soul Leading—‘Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the City of Heaven, Amen.’”
“Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the City of Heaven, Amen,” Young Ian repeated under his breath. He nodded slowly. “Aye, all right. And then?”
Jamie reached out and touched his nephew’s cheek with great gentleness. “Then ye live with it, laddie,” he said softly. “That’s all.”