* * *
Thoroughly worn out by the events of the afternoon, I had fallen asleep at once, the pain in my arm dulled by brandy. Now it was full dark, and the brandy had worn off. My arm seemed to swell and throb with each beat of my heart, and any small movement sent tiny jabs of a sharper pain whipping through my arm, like warning flicks of a scorpion’s tail.
The moon was three-quarters full, a huge lopsided shape like a golden teardrop, hanging just above the horizon. The ship heeled slightly, and the moon slid slowly out of sight, the Man in the Moon leering rather unpleasantly as he went. I was hot, and possibly a trifle feverish.
There was a jug of water in the cupboard on the far side of the cabin. I felt weak and giddy as I swung my feet over the edge of the berth, and my arm registered a strong protest against being disturbed. I must have made some sound, for the darkness on the floor of the cabin stirred suddenly, and Jamie’s voice came drowsily from the region of my feet.
“Are ye hurting, Sassenach?”
“A little,” I said, not wanting to be dramatic about it. I set my lips and rose unsteadily to my feet, cradling my right elbow in my left hand.
“That’s good,” he said.
“That’s good?” I said, my voice rising indignantly.
There was a soft chuckle from the darkness, and he sat up, his head popping suddenly into sight as it rose above the shadows into the moonlight.
“Aye, it is,” he said. “When a wound begins to hurt ye, it means it’s healing. Ye didna feel it when it happened, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. I certainly felt it now. The air was a good deal cooler out on the open sea, and the salt wind coming through the window felt good on my face. I was damp and sticky with sweat, and the thin chemise clung to my breasts.
“I could see ye didn’t. That’s what frightened me. Ye never feel a fatal wound, Sassenach,” he said softly.
I laughed shortly, but cut it off as the movement jarred my arm.
“And how do you know that?” I asked, fumbling left-handed to pour water into a cup. “Not the sort of thing you’d learn firsthand, I mean.”
“Murtagh told me.”
The water seemed to purl soundlessly into the cup, the sound of its pouring lost in the hiss of the bow-wave outside. I set down the jug and lifted the cup, the surface of the water black in the moonlight. Jamie had never mentioned Murtagh to me, in the months of our reunion. I had asked Fergus, who told me that the wiry little Scot had died at Culloden, but he knew no more than the bare fact.
“At Culloden.” Jamie’s voice was barely loud enough to be heard above the creak of timber and the whirring of the wind that bore us along. “Did ye ken they burnt the bodies there? I wondered, listening to them do it—what it would be like inside the fire when it came my turn.” I could hear him swallow, above the creaking of the ship. “I found that out, this morning.”
The moonlight robbed his face of depth and color; he looked like a skull, with the broad, clean planes of cheek and jawbone white and his eyes black empty pits.
“I went to Culloden meaning to die,” he said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “Not the rest of them. I should have been happy to stop a musket ball at once, and yet I cut my way across the field and halfway back, while men on either side o’ me were blown to bloody bits.” He stood up, then, looking down at me.
“Why?” he said. “Why, Claire? Why am I alive, and they are not?”
“I don’t know,” I said softly. “For your sister, and your family, maybe? For me?”
“They had families,” he said. “Wives, and sweethearts; children to mourn them. And yet they are gone. And I am still here.”
“I don’t know, Jamie,” I said at last. I touched his cheek, already roughened by newly sprouting beard, irrepressible evidence of life. “You aren’t ever going to know.”
He sighed, his cheekbone pressed against my palm for a moment.
“Aye, I ken that well enough. But I canna help the asking, when I think of them—especially Murtagh.” He turned restlessly away, his eyes empty shadows, and I knew he walked Drumossie Moor again, with the ghosts.
“We should have gone sooner; the men had been standing for hours, starved and half-frozen. But they waited for His Highness to give the order to charge.”
And Charles Stuart, perched safely on a rock, well behind the line of battle, having seized personal command of his troops for the first time, had dithered and delayed. And the English cannon had had time to bear squarely on the lines of ragged Highlanders, and opened fire.
“It was a relief, I think,” Jamie said softly. “Every man on the field knew the cause was lost, and we were dead. And still we stood there, watching the English guns come up, and the cannon mouths open black before us. No one spoke. I couldna hear anything but the wind, and the English soldiers shouting, on the other side of the field.”
And then the guns had roared, and men had fallen, and those still standing, rallied by a late and ragged order, had seized their swords and charged the enemy, the sound of their Gaelic shrieking drowned by the guns, lost in the wind.
“The smoke was so thick, I couldna see more than a few feet before me. I kicked off my shoon and ran into it, shouting.” The bloodless line of his lips turned up slightly.
“I was happy,” he said, sounding a bit surprised. “Not scairt at all. I meant to die, after all; there was nothing to fear except that I might be wounded and not die at once. But I would die, and then it would be all over, and I would find ye again, and it would be all right.”
I moved closer to him, and his hand rose up from the shadows to take mine.
“Men fell to either side of me, and I could hear the grapeshot and the musket balls hum past my head like bumblebees. But I wasna touched.”
He had reached the British lines unscathed, one of very few Highlanders to have completed the charge across Culloden Moor. An English gun crew looked up, startled, at the tall Highlander who burst from the smoke like a demon, the blade of his broadsword gleaming with rain and then dull with blood.
“There was a small part of my mind that asked why I should be killin’ them,” he said reflectively. “For surely I knew that we were lost; there was no gain to it. But there is a lust to killing—you’ll know that?” His fingers tightened on mine, questioning, and I squeezed back in affirmation.
“I couldna stop—or I would not.” His voice was quiet, without bitterness or recrimination. “It’s a verra old feeling, I think; the wish to take an enemy with ye to the grave. I could feel it there, a hot red thing in my chest and belly, and…I gave myself to it,” he ended simply.
There were four men tending the cannon, none armed with more than a pistol and knife, none expecting attack at such close quarters. They stood helpless against the berserk strength of his despair, and he killed them all.
“The ground shook under my feet,” he said, “and I was near deafened by the noise. I couldna think. And then it came to me that I was behind the English guns.” A soft chuckle came from below. “A verra poor place to try to be killed, no?”
So he had started back across the moor, to join the Highland dead.
“He was sitting against a tussock near the middle of the field—Murtagh. He’d been struck a dozen times at least, and there was a dreadful wound in his head—I knew he was dead.”
He hadn’t been, though; when Jamie had fallen to his knees beside his godfather and taken the small body in his arms, Murtagh’s eyes had opened. “He saw me. And he smiled.” And then the older man’s hand had touched his cheek briefly. “Dinna be afraid, a bhalaich,” Murtagh had said, using the endearment for a small, beloved boy. “It doesna hurt a bit to die.”
I stood quietly for a long time, holding Jamie’s hand. Then he sighed, and his other hand closed very, very gently about my wounded arm.
“Too many folk have died, Sassenach, because they knew me—or suffered for the knowing. I would give my own body to save ye a moment’s pain—and yet I could wish to close my hand just now, that I might hear ye cry out and know for sure that I havena killed you, too.”
I leaned forward, pressing a kiss on the skin of his chest. He slept naked in the heat.
“You haven’t killed me. You didn’t kill Murtagh. And we’ll find Ian. Take me back to bed, Jamie.”
Sometime later, as I drowsed on the edge of sleep, he spoke from the floor beside my bed.
“Ye know, I seldom wanted to go home to Laoghaire,” he said contemplatively. “And yet, at least when I did, I’d find her where I’d left her.”
I turned my head to the side, where his soft breathing came from the darkened floor. “Oh? And is that the kind of wife you want? The sort who stays put?”
He made a small sound between a chuckle and a cough, but didn’t answer, and after a few moments, the sound of his breathing changed to a soft, rhythmic snore.