UNFINISHED BUSINESS
WILLIAM SHOVED his way through the crowds in the City Market, oblivious to the complaints of those rebounding from his impact.
He knew where he was going and what he meant to do when he got there. It was the only thing left to do before leaving Savannah. After that . . . it didn’t matter.
His head throbbed like an inflamed boil. Everything throbbed. His hand—he’d probably broken something, but he didn’t care. His heart, pounding and sore inside his chest. He hadn’t slept since they’d buried Jane; would likely never sleep again and didn’t care.
He remembered where the warehouse was. The place was almost empty; doubtless the soldiers had taken everything the owner hadn’t had time to move out of reach. Three men were lounging by the far wall, sitting on the few remaining casks of salt fish and smoking their pipes; the smell of tobacco reached him, a small comfort in the echoing cold fishiness of the building.
“James Fraser?” he said to one of the loungers, and the man pointed with the stem of his pipe toward a small office, a sort of shed attached to the far wall of the warehouse.
The door was open; Fraser was seated at a table covered with papers, writing something by the light that fell through a tiny barred window behind him. He looked up at the sound of William’s footsteps and, seeing him, put down his quill and rose slowly to his feet. William came forward, facing him across the table.
“I have come to take my farewell,” William said, very formally. His voice was less firm than he liked, and he cleared his throat hard.
“Aye? Where is it that ye mean to go?” Fraser was wearing his plaid, the faded colors muted further by the dimness of the light, but what light there was sparked suddenly from his hair as he moved his head.
“I don’t know,” William said, gruff. “It doesn’t matter.” He took a deep breath. “I—wished to thank you. For what you did. Even though—” His throat closed tight; try as he might, he couldn’t keep Jane’s small white hand out of his thoughts.
Fraser made a slight dismissive motion and said softly, “God rest her, poor wee lass.”
“Even so,” William said, and cleared his throat again. “But there is one further favor that I wished to ask of you.”
Fraser’s head came up; he looked surprised but nodded.
“Aye, of course,” he said. “If I can.”
William turned and pulled the door shut, then turned to face the man again.
“Tell me how I came to be.”
The whites of Fraser’s eyes flashed in brief astonishment, then disappeared as his eyes narrowed.
“I want to know what happened,” William said. “When you lay with my mother. What happened that night? If it was night,” he added, and then felt foolish for doing so.
Fraser eyed him for a moment.
“Ye want to tell me what it was like, the first time ye lay with a woman?”
William felt the blood rush into his head, but before he could speak, the Scot went on.
“Aye, exactly. A decent man doesna speak of such things. Ye dinna tell your friends such things, do ye? No, of course not. So much less would ye tell your . . . father, or a father his . . .”
The hesitation before “father” was brief, but William caught it, no trouble. Fraser’s mouth was firm, though, and his eyes direct.
“I wouldna tell ye, no matter who ye were. But being who ye are—”
“Being who I am, I think I have a right to know!”
Fraser looked at him for a moment, expressionless. He closed his eyes for an instant and sighed. Then opened them and drew himself up, straightening his shoulders.
“No, ye haven’t. But that’s not what ye want to know, in any case,” he said. “Ye want to know, did I force your mother. I did not. Ye want to know, did I love your mother. I did not.”
William let that lie there for a moment, controlling his breathing ’til he was sure his voice would be steady.
“Did she love you?” It would have been easy to love him. The thought came to him unbidden—and unwelcome—but with it, his own memories of Mac the groom. Something he shared with his mother.
Fraser’s eyes were cast down, watching a trail of tiny ants running along the scuffed floorboards.
“She was verra young,” he said softly. “I was twice her age. It was my fault.”
There was a brief silence, broken only by their breathing and the distant shouts of men working on the river.
“I’ve seen the portraits,” William said abruptly. “Of my—of the eighth earl. Her husband. Have you?”
Fraser’s mouth twisted a little, but he shook his head.
“You know, though—knew. He was fifty years older than she was.”
Fraser’s maimed hand twitched, fingers tapping lightly against his thigh. Yes, he’d known. How could he not have known? He dipped his head, not quite a nod.
“I’m not stupid, you know,” William said, louder than he’d intended.
“Didna think ye were,” Fraser muttered, but didn’t look at him.
“I can count,” William went on, through his teeth. “You lay with her just before her wedding. Or was it just after?”
That went home; Fraser’s head jerked up and there was a flash of dark-blue anger.
“I wouldna deceive another man in his marriage. Believe that of me, at least.”
Oddly enough, he did. And in spite of the anger he still struggled to keep in check, he began to think he perhaps understood how it might have been.
“She was reckless.” He made it a statement, not a question, and saw Fraser blink. It wasn’t a nod, but he thought it was acknowledgment and went on, more confident.
“Everyone says that—everyone who knew her. She was reckless, beautiful, careless . . . she took chances . . .”
“She had courage.” It was said softly, the words dropped like pebbles in water, and the ripples spread through the tiny room. Fraser was still looking straight at him. “Did they tell ye that, then? Her family, the folk who kent her?”
“No,” William said, and felt the word sharp as a stone in his throat. For just an instant, he’d seen her in those words. He’d seen her, and the knowledge of the immensity of his loss struck through his anger like a lightning bolt. He drove his fist into the table, striking it once, twice, hammering it ’til the wood shook and the legs juddered over the floor, papers flying and the inkwell falling over.
He stopped as suddenly as he’d started, and the racket ceased.
“Are you sorry?” he said, and made no effort to keep his voice from shaking. “Are you sorry for it, damn you?”
Fraser had turned away; now he turned sharply to face William but didn’t speak at once. When he did, his voice was low and firm.
“She died because of it, and I shall sorrow for her death and do penance for my part in it until my own dying day. But—” He compressed his lips for an instant, and then, too fast for William to back away, came round the table and, raising his hand, cupped William’s cheek, the touch light and fierce.
“No,” he whispered. “No! I am not sorry.” Then he whirled on his heel, threw open the door, and was gone, kilt flying.
PART NINE
“Thig crioch air an t-saoghal ach mairidh ceol agus gaol.”
“The world may come to an end, but love and music will endure.”
IN THE WILDERNESS A LODGING PLACE
ICOULDN’T STOP BREATHING. From the moment we left the salt-marsh miasma of Savannah, with its constant fog of rice paddies, mud, and decaying crustaceans, the air had grown clearer, the scents cleaner—well, putting aside the Wilmington mudflats, redolent with their memories of crocodiles and dead pirates—spicier, and more distinct. And as we reached the summit of the final pass, I thought I might explode from simple joy at the scent of the late-spring woods, an intoxicating mix of pine and balsam fir, oaks mingling the spice of fresh green leaves with the must of the winter’s fallen acorns, and the nutty sweetness of chestnut mast under a layer of wet dead leaves, so thick that it made the air seem buoyant, bearing me up. I couldn’t get enough of it into my lungs.
“If ye keep gasping like that, Sassenach, ye’re like to pass out,” Jamie said, smiling as he came up beside me. “How’s the new knife, then?”
“Wonderful! Look, I found a huge ginseng root, and a birch gall and—”
He stopped this with a kiss, and I dropped the soggy gunnysack full of plants on the path and kissed him back. He’d been eating wild spring onions and watercress plucked dripping from a creek and he smelled of his own male scent, pine sap, and the bloody tang of the two dead rabbits hanging at his belt; it was like kissing the wilderness itself, and it went on for a bit, interrupted only by a discreet cough a few feet away.
We let go of each other at once, and I took an automatic step back behind Jamie even as he stepped in front of me, hand hovering within reach of his dirk. A split second later, he’d taken a huge stride forward and engulfed Mr. Wemyss in an enormous hug.
“Joseph! A charaid! Ciamar a tha thu?”
Mr. Wemyss, a small, slight, elderly man, was swept literally off his feet; I could see a shoe dangling loose from the toes of one stockinged foot as he groped for traction. Smiling at this, I glanced round to see if Rachel and Ian had come into sight yet and spotted instead a small, round-faced boy on the path. He was perhaps four or five, with long fair hair, this flying loose around his shoulders.
“Er . . . Rodney?” I asked, making a hasty guess. I hadn’t seen him since he was two or so, but I couldn’t think who else might be accompanying Mr. Wemyss.
The child nodded, examining me soberly.
“You be the conjure-woman?” he said, in a remarkably deep voice.
“Yes,” I said, rather surprised at this address, but still more surprised at how right my acknowledgment of it felt. I realized at that moment that I had been resuming my identity as we walked, that step by step as we climbed the mountain, smelling its scents and harvesting its plenty, I had sloughed off a few layers of the recent past and become again what I had last been in this place. I had come back.
“Yes,” I said again. “I am Mrs. Fraser. You may call me Grannie Fraser, if you like.”
He nodded thoughtfully, taking this in and mouthing “Grannie Fraser” to himself once or twice, as though to taste it. Then he looked at Jamie, who had set Mr. Wemyss back on his feet and was smiling down at him with a look of joy that turned my heart to wax.
“Izzat Himself?” Rodney whispered, drawing close to me.
“That is Himself,” I agreed, nodding gravely.
“Aidan said he was big,” Rodney remarked, after another moment’s scrutiny.
“Is he big enough, do you think?” I asked, rather surprised by the realization that I didn’t want Rodney to be disappointed in this first sight of Himself.
Rodney gave an odd sideways tilt of his head, terribly familiar—it was what his mother, Lizzie, did when making a judgment about something—and said philosophically, “Well, he’s lot’s bigger ’n me, anyway.”
“Everything is relative,” I agreed. “And speaking of relatives, how is your mother? And your . . . er . . . father?”
I was wondering whether Lizzie’s unorthodox marriage was still in effect. Having fallen accidentally in love with identical-twin brothers, she had—with a guile and cunning unexpected in a demure nineteen-year-old Scottish bond servant—contrived to marry them both. There was no telling whether Rodney’s father was Josiah or Keziah Beardsley, but I did wonder—
“Oh, Mammy’s breedin’ again,” Rodney said casually. “She says she’s a-going to castrate Daddy or Da or both of ’em, if that’s what it takes to put a stop to it.”
“Ah . . . well, that would be effective,” I said, rather taken aback. “How many sisters or brothers have you got?” I’d delivered a sister before we’d left the Ridge, but—
“One sister, one brother.” Rodney was clearly growing bored with me and stood on his toes to look down the path behind me. “Is that Mary?”
“What?” Turning, I saw Ian and Rachel navigating a horseshoe bend some way below; they vanished into the trees even as I watched.
“You know, Mary ’n Joseph a-flying into Egypt,” he said, and I laughed in sudden understanding. Rachel, very noticeably pregnant, was riding Clarence, with Ian, who hadn’t troubled to shave for the last several months and was sporting a beard of quasi-biblical dimensions, walking beside her. Jenny was presumably still out of sight behind them, riding the mare with Franny and leading the pack mule.
“That’s Rachel,” I said. “And her husband, Ian. Ian is Himself’s nephew. You mentioned Aidan—is his family well, too?” Jamie and Mr. Wemyss had started off toward the trailhead, talking sixteen to the dozen about affairs on the Ridge. Rodney took my hand in a gentlemanly way and nodded after them.
“We’d best be going down. I want to tell Mam first, afore Opa gets there.”
“Opa . . . oh, your grandfather?” Joseph Wemyss had married a German lady named Monika, soon after Rodney’s birth, and I thought I recalled that “Opa” was a German expression for “grandfather.”
“Ja,” Rodney said, confirming this supposition.
The trail meandered back and forth across the upper slopes of the Ridge, offering me tantalizing glimpses through the trees of the settlement below: scattered cabins among the bright-flowered laurels, the fresh-turned black earth of vegetable gardens—I touched the digging knife at my belt, suddenly dying to have my hands in the dirt, to pull weeds . . .
“Oh, you are losing your grip, Beauchamp,” I murmured at the thought of ecstatic weed-pulling, but smiled nonetheless.
Rodney was not a chatterbox, but we kept up an amiable conversation as we walked. He said that he and his opa had walked up to the head of the pass every day for the last week, to be sure of meeting us.
“Mam and Missus Higgins have a ham saved for ye, for supper,” he told me, and licked his lips in anticipation. “And there’s honey to have with our corn bread! Daddy found a bee tree last Tuesday sennight and I helped him smoke ’em. And . . .”
I replied, but absentmindedly, and after a bit we both lapsed into a companionable silence. I was bracing myself for the sight of the clearing where the Big House had once stood—and a brief, deep qualm swept through me, remembering fire.
The last time I had seen the house, it was no more than a heap of blackened timbers. Jamie had already chosen a site for a new house and had felled the trees for it, leaving them stacked. Sadness and regret there might be in this return—but there were bright green spikes of anticipation poking through that scorched earth. Jamie had promised me a new garden, a new surgery, a bed long enough to stretch out in—and glass windows.
Just before we came to the spot where the trail ended above the clearing, Jamie and Mr. Wemyss stopped, waiting for Rodney and me to catch up. With a shy smile, Mr. Wemyss kissed my hand and then took Rodney’s, saying, “Come along, Roddy, you can be first to tell your mam that Himself and his lady have come back!”
Jamie took my hand and squeezed it hard. He was flushed from the walk, and even more from excitement; the color ran right down into the open neck of his shirt, turning his skin a beautiful rosy bronze.
“I’ve brought ye home, Sassenach,” he said, his voice a little husky. “It willna be the same—and I canna say how things will be now—but I’ve kept my word.”
My throat was so choked that I could barely whisper “Thank you.” We stood for a long moment, clasped tight together, summoning up the strength to go around that last corner and look at what had been, and what might be.
Something brushed the hem of my skirt, and I looked down, expecting that a late cone from the big spruce we were standing by had fallen.
A large gray cat looked up at me with big, calm eyes of celadon green and dropped a fat, hairy, very dead wood rat at my feet.
“Oh, God!” I said, and burst into tears.