FROTTAGE
DR. MCEWAN WAS a single man and owned a single bed. The bed was presently accommodating four people, and even if two of those people were not full-sized, the general atmosphere was that of the London Tube in rush hour. Heat, random flesh in all directions, and a distinct shortage of oxygen.
Brianna squirmed, trying to find room to breathe. She was lying on her side, back pressed to the wall, with Mandy squashed into a heavily breathing mass between her parents. Roger balanced precariously on the bed’s outer edge with Jem draped bonelessly over him, Jem’s legs occasionally twitching spasmodically, prodding Bree in the shins. And Esmeralda was taking up most of the single pillow, red yarn hair getting up everyone’s nose.
“Do you know the word ‘frottage’?” Bree whispered to Roger. He wasn’t asleep; if he had been, he’d have been on the floor by now.
“I do. Why, do ye want to try it now?” He reached carefully across Jem and stroked her bare arm lightly. The fine hairs rose on her forearm; she could see them do it, lifting silently in the dull glow from the hearth.
“I want to do less of it with a three-year-old. Mandy’s zonked. Is Jem asleep enough to move?”
“We’ll find out. I’m going to suffocate if he’s not.” Roger edged out from under his son, who emitted a loud “mmmm,” but then smacked his lips and subsided. Roger patted him softly, bent to check that he was solidly asleep, and straightened up. “Okay, then.”
They’d appeared at McEwan’s door well after dark, Brianna supported between Roger and Buck, the children at their heels. The doctor, while clearly surprised at this nocturnal invasion of MacKenzies, had taken it calmly, sitting Bree down in his surgery with her foot in a pan of cold water and then going to call his landlady to find a bit of supper for the children.
“A sprain, and not too bad,” he’d assured Brianna, drying her foot with a linen towel and expertly palpating her swollen ankle. He passed a thumb up the problematic tendon and noted her wince. “It will just take time to heal—but I think I can ease the pain a bit . . . if you like?” He glanced toward Roger, brow raised, and Brianna breathed in through her nose.
“It’s not his ankle,” she said, mildly annoyed. “And I’d certainly appreciate anything you can do.”
Roger nodded, to her further annoyance, and McEwan took her foot onto his knee. Seeing her grip the edges of the stool to keep her balance, Roger knelt behind her and wrapped his arms around her.
“Lean on me,” he said quietly in her ear. “Just breathe. See what happens.”
She shot him a puzzled look, but he merely brushed her ear with his lips and nodded toward McEwan.
The doctor’s head was bent over the foot, which he held lightly in both hands, his thumbs on her instep. He moved them slowly in circles, then pressed firmly. A sharp pain shot up her ankle, but died abruptly before she could gasp.
The doctor’s hands were noticeably warm on her chilled flesh, and she wondered at that, since they’d been immersed in the same cold water as her foot. One hand now cupped her heel, and thumb and forefinger massaged the puffy flesh lightly, repeatedly, then a little harder. The sensation hovered unsettlingly somewhere between pain and pleasure.
McEwan looked up suddenly and smiled at her.
“It will take a little time,” he murmured. “Relax, if you can.”
In fact, she could. For the first time in twenty-four hours, she wasn’t hungry. For the first time in days, she was beginning to thaw out completely—and for the first time in months, she wasn’t afraid. She let out her breath and eased her head back on Roger’s shoulder. He made a low humming noise in his throat and took a firmer hold, settling himself.
She could hear Mandy telling Jem a disjointed story about Esmeralda’s adventures, in the back room where the landlady had taken them to eat their soup and bread. Sure that they were safe, she gave herself up to the elemental bliss of her husband’s arms and the smell of his skin.
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face;
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists . . .
“Bree,” Roger whispered to her some moments later. “Bree—look.”
She opened her eyes and saw at first the curve of his wrist where it rested on her bosom, the hard elegance of bone and the curve of muscled forearm. But then her focus widened and she started a little. Her toes were glowing with a faint blue light barely visible in the crevices between them. She blinked hard and looked again, to be sure she was really seeing it, but the sound Roger made in his throat assured her that she was—and that he saw it, too.
Dr. McEwan had felt her startlement; he looked up and smiled again, this time joyful. His eyes flicked up toward Roger, then back to her.
“You, too?” he said. “I thought so.” He held her foot still for a long moment, until she thought she felt the pulse in his fingers echo in the spaces between the small bones, and then he wrapped a bandage neatly around her ankle and lowered her foot gently to the floor. “Better now?”
“Yes,” she said, and found her voice a little husky. “Thank you.”
She’d wanted to ask him questions, but he rose and put on his coat.
“Ye’ll oblige me greatly by staying here the night,” he said firmly, still smiling at her. “I’ll find a bed with a friend.” And raising his hat to Roger, he bowed and went out, leaving them to put the children to bed.
Not surprisingly, Mandy had put up a fuss at sleeping in a strange bed in a strange room, complaining that Esmeralda thought the surgery smelled funny and was scared of the big wardrobe because there might be kelpies in it.
“Kelpies only live in water, silly,” Jem had said, but he also looked a little apprehensively at the enormous dark armoire with its cracked door. So they’d all lain down on the narrow bed together, parents comforted as much as children by sheer physical proximity.
Brianna felt the soft warmth and the haze of exhalation blanketing her bodily exhaustion, a pull on her senses beckoning her toward the well of sleep. But not nearly such a strong pull as her sense of Roger.
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees; dress does not hide him . . .
She lay for a moment, hand on Mandy’s back, feeling the slow beating of the child’s heart, watching as Roger scooped Jem into his arms and turned to lay him down on one of the extra quilts McEwan’s landlady had brought up with the soup.
The strong, sweet, supple quality he has, strikes through the cotton and flannel . . .
He was dressed in nothing but shirt and breeks and now paused to shed the homespun breeks, casually scratching his arse in relief, the long linen shirt momentarily rucked up to show the lean curve of a buttock. Then he came to pick up Mandy, smiling over her stertorously breathing body at Bree.
“Leave the bed to the kids, you think? We could make up a pallet with the cloaks—if they’ve dried out a bit—and quilts in the surgery.” He gathered Mandy up like an armful of laundry, and Bree was able to sit up and scoot across the bed, feeling a wonderful movement of air through her perspiration-dampened shift and a brush of soft fabric across her breasts that made her nipples rise.
She turned back the bedding; he moved the children back to the bed, and she covered them and kissed their dreaming faces, kissing Esmeralda for good measure before tucking her into Mandy’s arm. Roger turned toward the closed door to the surgery and looked back at Bree over his shoulder, smiling. She could see the shadow of his body through the linen shirt, against the glow of the hearth.
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more . . .
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.
“Wilt bed with me, lass?” he said softly, and put out a hand to her.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and came to him.
THE SURGERY WAS cold, after the humid heat of the bedroom, and they came to each other at once, warm limbs and warm lips seeking. The fire in this room had gone out, and they didn’t trouble to rebuild it.
Roger had kissed her the moment he saw her on the ground in the fort, grabbing her and lifting her into an embrace that crushed her ribs and nearly bruised her lips. She’d had no objections whatever. But now his mouth was soft and tender and the scruff of his beard light on her skin.
“Fast?” he murmured against her mouth. “Slow?”
“Horizontal,” she murmured back, clutching his bottom. “Speed irrelevant.” She was standing on one leg, the bad foot elegantly—she hoped—extended behind her. Dr. McEwan’s ministrations had eased the throbbing quite a bit, but she still couldn’t put weight on it for more than the briefest second.
He laughed—quietly, with a guilty look toward the bedroom door—and, bending suddenly, scooped her up and staggered across the room to the coat rack, where she snagged the hanging cloaks and tossed them onto the floor by the table, that being the cleanest open space visible. He squatted, back creaking audibly and manfully suppressing a groan as he lowered her gently onto the heap.
“Be careful!” she whispered, and not jokingly. “You could put your back out, and then what?”
“Then ye’d get to be on top,” he whispered back, and ran a hand up her thigh, her shift rippling up with it. “But I haven’t, so ye don’t.” Then he pulled up his shirt, spread her legs, and came to her with an incoherent noise of deep satisfaction.
“I hope ye meant it about the speed being irrelevant,” he said in her ear, a few minutes later.
“Oh. Yes,” she said vaguely, and wrapped her arms round his body. “You . . . just . . . stay put.” When she could, she let him go, cradling his head and kissing the smooth warm flesh at the side of his neck. She felt the rope scar and gently drew the tip of her tongue along it, making gooseflesh erupt all over his back and shoulders.
“Are you asleep?” he inquired some moments later, suspicious.
She opened one eye halfway. He’d gone back into the bedroom for quilts and was kneeling beside her, spreading one over her. It smelled faintly musty, with a tang of mice, but she didn’t care.
“No,” she said, and rolled onto her back, feeling wonderful, despite the hard floor, her sprained ankle, and the dawning realization that Dr. McEwan must do operations and amputations on the table. There was a dark stain on the underside, above her head. “Just . . . limp.” She stretched out a slow hand to Roger, urging him under the quilt with her. “You?”
“I’m not asleep,” he assured her, sliding down close beside her. “And if ye think I’m going to say ‘limp,’ think again.”
She laughed—quietly, with a glance at the door—rolled over, and rested her forehead against his chest.
“I thought I might never see you again,” she whispered.
“Aye,” he said softly, and his hand stroked her long hair and her back. “Me, too.” They were silent for a long moment, each listening to the other’s breath—his came easier than it had, she thought, without the small catches—and then he finally said, “Tell me.”
She did, baldly and with as little emotion as she could manage. She thought he might be emotional enough for both of them.
He couldn’t shout or curse, because of the sleeping children. She could feel the rage in him; he was shaking with it, his fists clenched like solid knobs of bone.
“I’ll kill him,” he said, in a voice barely pitched above silence, and his eyes met hers, savage and so dark that they seemed black in the dim light.
“It’s okay,” she said softly, and, sitting up, took both his hands in hers, lifting one and then the other to her lips. “It’s okay. We’re all right, all of us. And we’re here.”
He looked away and took a deep breath, then looked back, his hands tightening on hers.
“Here,” he repeated, his voice bleak, still hoarse with fury. “In 1739. If I’d—”
“You had to,” she said firmly, squeezing back hard. Besides,” she added, a little diffidently, “I sort of thought we wouldn’t stay. Unless you’ve taken a great liking to some of the denizens?”
Expressions flickered across his face, from anger to rue to reluctant acceptance . . . and an even more reluctant humor, as he got a grip of himself. He cleared his throat.
“Aye, well,” he said dryly. “There’s Hector McEwan, to be sure. But there are a good many other people, too—Geillis Duncan, for one.”
A small jolt went through her at the name.
“Geillis Duncan? Well . . . yes, I suppose she would be here at this point, wouldn’t she? Did you—did you meet her?”
A truly extraordinary expression went over Roger’s face at that question.
“I did,” he said, avoiding her questioning glance. He turned and waved a hand at the surgery window that looked out onto the square. “She lives just across the way.”
“Really?” Brianna got to her feet, clutching a quilt to her bosom, forgot about her bad foot, and stumbled. Roger leapt up and caught her by the arm.
“You don’t want to meet her,” he said, with emphasis. “Sit down, aye? Ye’re going to fall.”
Brianna eyed him, but allowed him to ease her back down to their nest and to pull a quilt up over her shoulders. It was bloody cold in the surgery, now that the warmth of their efforts had faded.
“All right,” she said, and shook her hair down to cover her ears and neck. “Tell me why I don’t want to meet Geillis Duncan.”
To her surprise, he flushed deeply, visible even in the shadows of the surgery. Roger had neither the skin nor the temperament to blush easily, but when he did describe—briefly, but vividly—what had happened (or possibly not happened) with Buck, Dr. McEwan, and Geillis, she understood it.
“Holy moly,” she said, with a glance over her shoulder at the window. “Er . . . when Dr. McEwan said he’d find a bed with a friend . . . ?”
Buck had gone off, saying that he’d take a bed at the ordinary at the foot of the High Street and would see them in the morning. Presumably he’d meant it, but . . .
“She is married,” Roger said tersely. “Presumably her husband would notice were she inviting strange men to spend the night.”
“Oh, I don’t know so much,” she said, half-teasing. “She’s an herbalist, remember? Mama does a good sleeping potion; I imagine Geillis could, too.”
The color washed up Roger’s face again, and she knew, as clearly as if he’d said so, that he was envisioning Geillis Duncan doing something disgraceful with one or another of her lovers whilst lying beside her snoring husband.
“God,” he said.
“You, um, do remember what’s going to happen to her poor husband, don’t you?” Bree said delicately. The color vanished instantly from Roger’s face, and she knew he hadn’t.
“That’s one of the reasons we can’t stay here,” she said, gently but firmly. “There are too many things we know. And we don’t know what trying to interfere might do, but it’s a good bet that it’s dangerous.”
“Yes, but—” he began, but broke off at the look on her face. “Lallybroch. Is that why ye wouldna go there?” For he’d tried to take her down the hill to the house when he’d rescued her from the fort. She’d insisted that they must go to the village for help instead, even though it meant an awkward and painful three-hour ride.
She nodded and felt a small lump come into her throat. It stayed there as she told him about meeting Brian in the burying ground.
“It’s not just that I’m afraid what meeting them might do to . . . later,” she said, and the lump dissolved into tears. “It’s . . . oh, Roger, the look on his face when he saw me and thought I was Ellen!
“I—he—he’s going to die in a year or two. That beautiful, sweet man . . . and there isn’t any-anything we can do to stop it.” She gulped and swiped at her eyes. “He—he thinks he’s seen his wife and his son, that they’re w-waiting for him. And the—oh, God, the joy on his face. I couldn’t take that away from him, I just couldn’t.”
He took her in his arms and rubbed her back gently as she sobbed.
“No, of course ye couldn’t,” he whispered to her. “Dinna fash, Bree. Ye did right.”
She sniffed and groped among the cloaks for something to blow her nose on, settling at last for a stained cloth from Dr. McEwan’s table. It smelled of some pungent medicine, thank God, not blood.
“But there’s Da, too,” she said, taking a deep, tremulous breath. “What will happen to him . . . the scars on his back . . . I—can’t stand to think about that and us doing nothing, but we—”
“We can’t,” Roger agreed quietly. “We daren’t. God only knows what I may have done already, finding Jerry and sending him—wherever I did send him.” Taking the cloth, he dipped it in the water bucket and wiped her face, the cold of it soothing on her hot cheeks, though it made her shiver.
“Come lie down,” he said, putting an arm round her shoulders. “Ye need rest, mo chridhe. It’s been a terrible day.”
“No,” she murmured, easing down and laying her head in the curve of his shoulder, feeling the strength and warmth of his body. “It’s been a wonderful day. I have you back.”
THE SOUNDS THAT MAKE UP SILENCE
ROGER FELT HER begin to relax, and quite suddenly she let go her stubborn hold on consciousness and fell asleep like someone breathing ether. He held her and listened to the tiny sounds that made up silence: the distant hiss of the peat fire in the bedroom, a cold wind rattling at the window, the rustling and breathing of the sleeping kids, the slow beating of Brianna’s valiant heart.
Thank you, he said silently to God.
He had expected to fall asleep himself at once; tiredness covered him like a lead blanket. But the day was still with him, and he lay for some time looking up into the dark.
He was at peace, too tired to think coherently of anything. All the possibilities drifted round him in a slow, distant swirl, too far away to be troublesome. Where they might go . . . and how. What Buck might have said to Dougal MacKenzie. What Bree had brought in her bag, heavy as lead. Whether there would be porridge for breakfast—Mandy liked porridge.
The thought of Mandy made him ease out of the quilts to check on the children. To reassure himself that they were really there.
They were, and he stood by the bed for a long time, watching their faces in wordless gratitude, breathing the warm childish smell of them—still tinged with a slight tang of goat.
At last he turned, shivering, to make his way back to his warm wife and the beckoning bliss of sleep. But as he reentered the surgery, he glanced through the window into the night outside.
Cranesmuir slept, and mist lay in her streets, the cobbles beneath gleaming with wet in the half-light of a drowning moon. On the far side of the square, though, a light showed in the attic window of Arthur Duncan’s house.
And in the shadow of the square below, a small movement betrayed the presence of a man. Waiting.
Roger closed his eyes, cold rising from his bare feet up his body, seeing in his mind the sudden vision of a green-eyed woman, lazy in the arms of a fair-haired lover . . . and a look of surprise and then of horror on her face as the man vanished from her side. And an invisible blue glow rose in her womb.
With his eyes tight shut, he put a hand on the icy windowpane, and said a prayer to be going on with.
PART SEVEN
Before I Go Hence
A DISTANT MASSACRE
September 5, 1778
IFOLDED THE CLOTH into a tidy square and used the tongs to dip it in the steaming cauldron, then stood waving it gently to and fro until the compress should cool enough for me to wring it out and use it. Joanie sighed, fidgeting on her stool.
“Don’t rub your eye,” I said automatically, seeing her curled fist steal toward the large pink sty on her right eyelid. “Don’t fret; it won’t take long.”
“Yes, it does take long,” she said crossly. “It takes forever!”
“Dinna be giving your grannie sauce,” Marsali told her, pausing in her stride on the way from kitchen to printshop, a cheese roll for Fergus in her hand. “Hauld your wheesht and be grateful.”
Joanie groaned and writhed, and stuck her tongue out after her departing mother, but whipped it back into her mouth again and looked rather shame-faced when she caught sight of my raised brow.
“I know,” I said, with some sympathy. Holding a warm compress on a sty for ten minutes did feel like forever. Particularly if you’d been doing it six times a day for the last two days. “Maybe you can think of something to pass the time. You could recite me the multiplication tables while I grind valerian root.”
“Oh, Grannie!” she said, exasperated, and I laughed.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her the warm poultice. “Do you know any good songs?”
She exhaled moodily, small nostrils flaring.
“I wish Grandda was here,” she said. “He could tell me a story.” The note of comparative accusation was clear in her voice.
“Spell ‘hordeolum’ for me and I’ll tell you the one about the water horse’s wife,” I suggested. That made her unaffected eye fly open with interest.
“What’s a hordeolum?”
“That’s the scientific name for a sty.”
“Oh.” She seemed unimpressed by this, but her forehead creased a little in concentration, and I could see her lips move as she sounded out the syllables. Both Joanie and Félicité were good spellers; they’d been playing with discarded lead type since they were toddlers and loved stumping each other with new words.
That was a thought; maybe I could get her to spell unusual words for me during the compress treatments. The sty was a big, nasty one; her entire eyelid had been red and swollen in the beginning, the eye no more than a gleaming, resentful slit. Now the sty itself had shrunk to the size of a pea, and at least three-quarters of the eye was visible.
“H,” she said, watching me to see if that was right, and I nodded. “O, R, D . . .” I nodded again, and saw her lips move silently. “Hor-de-o-lum,” I repeated helpfully, and she nodded, more confident. “E, O, L, U, M!”
“Excellent!” I said, beaming at her. “How about . . .” I cast about for another good one, long but strictly phonetic. “Hepatitis?”
“What’s that?”
“Viral infection of the liver. Do you know where your liver is?” I was looking through my medicine chest, but appeared to be out of aloe salve. I should ride over to Bartram’s Garden tomorrow, I thought, weather permitting. I was out of almost everything, in the wake of the battle. The usual small twinge came in my side at thought of it, but I pushed it firmly away. It would fade, and so would the thoughts.
Marsali appeared suddenly in the kitchen door, as Joanie was carefully spelling “acanthocytosis,” and I looked up from my grinding. She was holding a letter in her hand and looked worried.
“Is it the Indian they call Joseph Brant that Young Ian kens?” she asked.
“I expect he knows quite a few of them,” I replied, setting down my pestle. “But I’ve heard him mention Joseph Brant, yes. The man’s Mohawk name starts with a ‘T,’ I think, but that’s as much as I feel sure of. Why?” I felt a slight uneasiness at the name. Ian’s Mohawk wife, Emily, had been living in a settlement in New York founded by Brant; Ian had mentioned it, very briefly, when he’d gone up there to visit her last year.
He hadn’t said what the purpose of his visit was, and neither Jamie nor I had asked, but I assumed it to have had something to do with his fear that he couldn’t sire children, as all his babies with Emily had either been stillborn or miscarried. He’d asked me about the matter, and I’d told him what I could, offering what reassurance I could that he might be able to have children with another woman.
I offered up a quick prayer for Rachel’s chances, then returned abruptly to what Marsali was saying.
“They did what?”
“This gentleman”—she tapped the letter—“says that Brant and his men fell upon a wee place called Andrustown. No but seven families living there.” Her lips pressed tight, and she glanced at Joanie, who was listening with her ears flapping. “They plundered and burnt the place, he says, and massa—er . . . did awa wi’ a number of the folk who lived there.”
“What’s that word, Mam?” Joanie asked brightly. “The one that means ‘did awa’ with?”
“‘Massacred,’” I told her, saving her mother the embarrassment. “It means indiscriminate and brutal slaughter. Here.” I handed her the fresh compress, which she applied without protest, frowning in thought.
“Is that different than just killin’ someone?”
“Well,” I said judiciously, “it depends. You might kill someone by accident, for instance, and that wouldn’t be a massacre, though it would certainly be lamentable. You might kill someone who was trying to kill you, and that would be self-defense.”
“Rachel says ye oughtn’t do that,” Joanie observed, but merely for the sake of thoroughness. “What about if ye’re with an army and have to kill the soldiers on the other side?”
Marsali made a low Scottish noise of disapproval but answered tersely.
“If a man’s gone to the army, then killin’ is his job,” she said. “He does it—mostly—” she added fairly, with a raised brow to me, “to protect his ain family and property. So that’s more like self-defense, aye?”
Joanie glanced from her mother to me, still frowning.
“I ken what ‘bru-tal’ is,” she said. “That’s bein’ mean when ye havena got to. But what’s ‘in-dis-crim-in-ate’?” She sounded it out carefully, as though about to spell it.
“Without choosing,” I said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “It means you do something without taking much notice who you do it to and probably without much reason to do it to that particular person.”
“Did Cousin Ian’s Indian friend have nay reason for burning yon place and killing the folk, then?”
Marsali and I exchanged a glance.
“We dinna ken that,” Marsali said. “But it’s no a good thing, whatever he meant by it. Now, ye’re done. Go along and find Félicité and start in fillin’ up the washtub.” She took the compress from Joanie and shooed her out.
She stood watching until Joanie had gone out through the back door, then turned to me and handed me the letter.
It was from a Mr. Johansen, apparently one of Fergus’s regular correspondents, and the contents were as Marsali had said, though adding a few gruesome details that she hadn’t mentioned in Joanie’s hearing. It was fairly factual, with only the barest of eighteenth-century ornaments, and the more hair-raising—literally, I thought; some of the Andrustown residents had been scalped, by report—for that.
Marsali nodded as I looked up from the letter.
“Aye,” she said. “Fergus wants to publish the account, but I’m nay so sure he ought to. Because of Young Ian, ken?”
“What’s because of Young Ian?” said a Scottish voice from the printshop doorway, and Jenny came through, a marketing basket over one arm. Her eyes went to the letter in my hand, and her sharp dark brows rose.
“Has he told ye much about her?” Marsali asked, having explained the letter. “The Indian lass he wed?”
Jenny shook her head and began taking things out of her basket.
“Nay a word, save for his telling Jamie to say he wouldna forget us.” A shadow crossed her face at the memory, and I wondered for a moment how it must have been for her and Ian, receiving Jamie’s account of the circumstances in which Ian had become a Mohawk. I knew the agony with which he’d written that letter, and doubted that the reading of it had been done with less.
She laid down an apple and beckoned to me for the letter. Having read it through in silence, she looked at me. “D’ye think he’s got feelings for her still?”
“I think he does,” I answered reluctantly. “But nothing like his feelings for Rachel, surely.” I did recall him, though, standing with me in the twilight on the demilune battery at Fort Ticonderoga, when he’d told me about his children—and Emily, his wife.
“He feels guilty about her, does he?” Jenny asked, shrewdly watching my face. I gave her a look, but nodded. She compressed her lips, but then handed the letter back to Marsali.
“Well, we dinna ken whether his wife has anything to do wi’ this Brant or his doings, and it’s no her that’s been massacred. I’d say let Fergus print it, but”—and she glanced at me—“show the letter to Jamie and have him talk to wee Ian about it. He’ll listen.” Her expression lightened a little then, and a slight smile emerged. “He’s got a good wife now, and I think Rachel will keep him to home.”