“What—did Geordie do?” I asked curiously. “Did he—does he know that Wally is his son?”
She shook her head.
“I dinna ken. He left, a month after the bairn was born—emigrated to Canada. No one was surprised at that; everyone kent he was mad in love wi’ Maggie and beside himself when she chose Paul. I expect that made it easier.”
“Out of sight, out of mind? Yes, I’d suppose so,” I said dryly. I thought I shouldn’t ask but couldn’t help myself. “Did Maggie ever tell Paul—after Geordie left, I mean?”
She shook her head and stood up, a little stiffly, shaking down her skirts.
“I dinna ken for sure, but I dinna think so. For her to tell him, after so long of keeping silent … how would he take that? And he’d still hate his brother, even if he couldna kill him right away.” Her blue eyes, so like Jamie’s, looked at me with rueful amusement. “Ye canna have been marrit to a Hieland man all these years and not ken how deep they can hate. Come on—we’d best gather these creatures before they burst.” And she waded off into the grass, shoes in her hand, calling out a Gàidhlig charm for gathering livestock:
“The Three who are above in the City of glory,
Be shepherding my flock and my kine,
Tending them duly in heat, in storm, and in cold,
With the blessing of power driving them down
From yonder height to the sheiling fold.”
I THOUGHT about it, after everyone had rolled up in their blankets and begun snoring that night. Well … I hadn’t stopped thinking about it since I’d seen the man. But in light of the story that Jenny had told me, my thoughts began to clarify, much as throwing an egg into a pot of coffee will settle the grounds.
The notion of saying nothing was of course the first one to come to my mind and was still my intent. The only difficulty—well, there were two, to be honest. But the first one was that, irritating as it was to be told so repeatedly, I couldn’t deny the fact that I had a glass face. If anything was seriously troubling me, the people I lived with immediately began glancing at me sideways, tiptoeing exaggeratedly around me—or, in Jamie’s case, demanding bluntly to know what the matter was.
Jenny had done much the same thing, though she hadn’t pressed me for details of my experience. Quite plainly, she’d guessed the outlines of it, though, or she wouldn’t have chosen to tell me Maggie’s story. It occurred to me belatedly to wonder whether Jamie had told her anything about Hodgepile’s attack and its aftermath.
The underlying difficulty, though, was my own response to meeting the dirty fat lumpkin. I snorted every time I repeated the description to myself, but it actually helped. He was a man, and not a very prepossessing one. Not a monster. Not … not bloody worth making a fuss about. God knew how he’d come to join Hodgepile’s band—I supposed that most criminal gangs were largely composed of feckless idiots, come to that.
And … little as I wanted to relive that experience … I did. He hadn’t come to me with any intent of hurting me, in fact hadn’t hurt me (which was not to say that he hadn’t crushed me with his weight, forced my thighs apart, and stuck his cock into me …).
I unclenched my teeth, drew a deep breath, and started over.
He’d come to me out of opportunity—and need.
“Martha,” he’d said, sobbing, his tears and snot warm on my neck. “Martha, I loved you so.”
Could I forgive him on those grounds? Put aside the unpleasantness of what he’d done to me and see him only as the pathetic creature that he was?
If I could—would that stop him living in my mind, a constant burr under the blanket of my thoughts?
I put back my head, looking up at the deep black sky swimming with hot stars. If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as van Gogh saw them, without difficulty … and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is—immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you.
Help me, I said silently.
I never talked to Jamie about Jack Randall. But I knew from the few things he told me—and the disjointed things he said in the worst of his dreams—that this was how he had chosen to survive. He’d forgiven Jack Randall. Over and over. But he was a stubborn man; he could do it. A thousand times, and still one more.
Help me, I said, and felt tears trickle down my temples, into my hair. Please. Help me.
THINGS COMING INTO VIEW
IT WORKED. NOT EASILY, and often not for more than a few minutes at a time—but the shock faded and, back at home, with the peace of the mountain and the love of family and friends surrounding me, I felt a welcome sense of balance return. I prayed, and I forgave, and I coped.
This was greatly helped by distraction. Summer is the busiest time in an agricultural community. And when men are working with scythes and hoes and wagons and livestock and guns and knives—they hurt themselves. As for the women and children—burns and household accidents and constipation and diarrhea and teething and … pinworms.
“There, you see?” I said in a low voice, holding a lighted candle a few inches from the buttocks of Tammas Wilson, aged two. Tammas, drawing the not unreasonable conclusion that I was about to scorch his bum or ram the candle up his backside, shrieked and kicked, trying to escape. His mother took a firmer grip on him, though, and pried his buttocks apart again, revealing the tiny white wriggles of female pinworms swarming round his less than ideally immaculate small anus.
“Christ between us and evil,” Annie Wilson said, letting go with one hand in order to cross herself. Tammas made a determined effort at escape and nearly succeeded in pitching himself headfirst into the fire. I seized him by one foot, though, and hauled him back.
“Those are the females,” I explained. “They crawl out at night and lay eggs on the skin. The eggs cause itching, and so, of course, your wee lad scratches. That’s what causes the redness and rash. But then he spreads the eggs to things he touches”—and, Tammas being two, he touched everything within reach—“and that’s why your whole family is likely infected.”
Mrs. Wilson squirmed slightly on her stool, whether because of pinworms or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell, and righted Tammas, who promptly wriggled out of her lap and made for the bed containing his two elder sisters, aged four and five. I grabbed him round the waist and lugged him back over to the hearth.
“Bride save us, what shall I do for it?” Annie asked, glancing helplessly from the sleeping girls to Mr. Wilson, who—worn out from his day’s work—was curled in the other bed, snoring.
“Well, for the older children and adults, you use this.” I took a bottle out of my basket and handed it over, rather gingerly. It wasn’t actually explosive, but, knowing its effects, it always gave me that illusion.
“It’s a tonic of flowering spurge and wild ipecac root. It’s a very strong laxative—that means it will give you the blazing shits,” I amended, seeing her incomprehension, “but a few doses will get rid of the pinworms, provided you can keep Tammas and the girls from respreading them. And for the smaller children—” I handed over a pot of garlic paste, strong enough to make Annie wrinkle her nose, even though it was corked. “Take a large glob on your finger and smear it round the child’s bumhole—and, er, up inside.”
“Aye,” she said, looking resigned, and took both pot and bottle. It probably wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever done as a mother. I gave her instructions regarding the boiling of bedding and strict advice about soap and religious hand-washing, wished her well, and left, feeling a strong urge to scratch my own bottom.
This faded on the walk back to the Higginses’ cabin, though, and I slid into the pallet beside Jamie with the peaceful sense of a job well done.
He rolled over drowsily and embraced me, then sniffed.
“What in God’s name have ye been doing, Sassenach?”
“You don’
t want to know,” I assured him. “What do I smell like?” If it was just garlic, I wasn’t getting up. If it was feces, though …
“Garlic,” he said, luckily. “Ye smell like a French gigot d’agneau.” His stomach rumbled at the thought, and I laughed—quietly.
“I think the best you’re likely to get is parritch for your breakfast.”
“That’s all right,” he said comfortably. “There’s honey for it.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, there being no pressing medical calls, I climbed up to the new house site with Jamie. The shield-shaped green leaves and arching stems of the wild strawberries were everywhere, spattering the hillside with tiny, sour-sweet red hearts. I’d brought a small basket with me—I never went anywhere without one in spring or summer—and had it half filled by the time we reached the clearing, with its fine view of the whole cove that lay below the Ridge.
“It seems like a lifetime ago that we came here first,” I remarked, sitting down on one of the stacks of half-hewn timbers and pulling off my wide-brimmed hat to let the breeze blow through my hair. “Do you remember when we found the strawberries?” I offered a handful of the fruit to Jamie.
“More like two or three. Lifetimes, I mean. But, aye, I remember.” He smiled, sat down beside me, and plucked one of the tiny berries from the palm of my hand. He motioned at the more or less level ground before us, where he’d laid out a rough floor plan with pegs driven into the earth and string outlining the rooms.
“Ye’ll want your surgery in the front, aye? The same as it was? That’s how I’ve put it, but it’s easy changed, if ye like.”
“Yes, I think so. I’ll be in there more than anywhere; be nice to be able to look out the window and see what sort of hideous emergency is coming.”
I’d spoken in complete seriousness, but he laughed and took a few more strawberries.
“At least if they have to come uphill, it will slow them down a bit.” He’d brought up the rough writing desk he’d made and now put it on his knee, opening it to show me his plans, neatly ruled in pencil.
“I’ll have my speak-a-word room across the hall from you, like we did before—ye’ll see I’ve made the hallway wider, because of the staircase landing—and I think I’d maybe like a wee parlor there, between the speak-a-word room and the kitchen. But the kitchen … d’ye think we should maybe have a separate cookhouse, as well, like John Grey did in Philadelphia?”
I considered that one for a moment, my mouth puckering a bit from the astringent berries. I wasn’t surprised that the thought had occurred to him; anyone who’d lived through one house fire, let alone two, would have a very lively awareness of the dangers.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said at last. “They do that as much because of the summer heat as for the danger of fire, and that’s not a problem here. We’ll have to have hearths in the house, after all. The danger of fire can’t be that much greater if we’re cooking on one of them.”
“Surely that depends who’s doin’ the cooking,” Jamie said, cocking an eyebrow at me.
“If you mean anything personal by that remark, you may retract it,” I said coolly. “I may not be the world’s best cook, but I’ve never served you cinders.”
“Well, ye are the only member o’ the family who’s ever burnt the house down, Sassenach. Ye’ve got to admit that much.” He was laughing and put up a casual hand to intercept the mock blow I aimed at him. His hand completely enclosed my fist, and he pulled me effortlessly off my perch and onto his knee.
He put an arm round me and his chin on my shoulder, brushing my hair out of his face with his free hand. He was barefoot and wearing only a shirt and his threadbare green-and-brown working plaid, the one he’d bought from a rag dealer in Savannah. It was rucked up over his thigh; I pulled the fold out from under my bottom and smoothed it down over the long muscle of his leg.
“Amy says there’s a Scottish weaver in Cross Creek,” I said. “When you next go down, maybe you should commission a new plaid—maybe one in your own tartan, if the weaver’s up to a Fraser red.”
“Aye, well. There’re plenty other things to spend money on, Sassenach. I dinna need to be grand to hunt or fish—and I work the fields in my shirt.”
“I could go round day in and day out in a gray flannel petticoat with holes in it and it wouldn’t make any difference to my work—but you wouldn’t want me to do that, would you?”
He made a low Scottish noise of amusement and shifted his weight, settling me more firmly.
“I would not. I like to look at ye now and then in a fine gown, lass, wi’ your hair put up and your sweet breasts showin’. Besides,” he added, “a man’s judged by how well he provides for his family. If I let ye go around in rags, folk would think I was either mean or improvident.” It was clear from his tone which of these conditions would be the more frightful sin.
“Oh, they would not,” I said, mostly teasing for the sake of argument. “Everyone on the Ridge knows perfectly well that you’re neither one. Besides, don’t you think I like to look at you in all your glory?”
“Why, that’s verra frivolous of ye, Sassenach; I should never have expected something like that from Dr. C.E.B.R. Fraser.” He was laughing again but stopped abruptly as he turned a little.
“Look,” he said into my ear, and pointed down the side of the cove. “Just there, on the right, where the creek comes out o’ the trees. See her?”
“Oh, no!” I said, spotting the smudge of white moving slowly among the green mats of cress and duckweed. “It can’t be, surely?” I couldn’t make out details at that distance without my glasses, but from the way it moved, the object in question was almost certainly a pig. A big pig. A big white pig.
“Well, if it’s no the white sow, it’s a daughter just like her. But my guess is that it’s the auld besom herself. I’d know that proud rump anywhere.”
“Well, then.” I leaned back against him with a little sigh of satisfaction. “Now I know we’re home.”
“Ye’ll sleep under your own roof within a month, a nighean,” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Mind, it may not be more than the roof of a lean-to, to start—but it’ll be our own. By the winter, though, I’ll have the chimneys built, the walls all up, and the roof on; I can be puttin’ in the floors and the doors while there’s snow on the ground.”
I put a hand up to cup his cheek, warm and lightly stubbled. I didn’t fool myself that this was paradise or even a refuge from the war—wars tended not to stay in one place but moved around, much in the manner of cyclones and even more destructive where they touched down. But for however long it lasted, this was home, and now was peace.
We sat in silence for a while, watching hawks circle over the open ground below and the machinations of the white sow—if indeed it was she—who had now been joined in her foraging by a number of smaller porcine blobs, doubtless this spring’s litter. At the foot of the cove, two men on horseback came into sight from the wagon road, and I felt Jamie’s attention sharpen, then relax.
“Hiram Crombie and the new circuit rider,” he said. “Hiram said he meant to go down to the crossroads and fetch the man up, so he’d not lose his way.”
“You mean so Hiram can make sure he’s dour enough for the job,” I said, laughing. “You realize they’ll have got out of the habit of thinking you’re human, don’t you?” Hiram Crombie was head man of the little group of settlers that Jamie had acquired six years before. All of them were Presbyterians of a particularly rock-ribbed disposition and inclined to regard Papists as being deeply perverse, if not actually the spawn of Satan.
Jamie made a small noise, but it was one of tolerant dismissal.
“They’ll get used to me again,” he said. “And I’d pay money to watch Hiram talk to Rachel. Here, Sassenach, my leg’s gone asleep.” He helped me off his lap and stood up, shaking his kilt into place. Faded or not, it suited him, and my heart rose to see him looking so much as he should: tall and broad-shouldered, head of his household, once mor
e master of his own land.
He looked out over the cove again, sighed deeply, and turned to me.
“Speakin’ of hideous emergencies,” he said thoughtfully, “ye do want to see them coming. So ye can be fettled against them, aye?” His eyes met mine directly. “Would now be a good time to tell me what’s coming, d’ye think?”
“THERE’S NOTHING wrong,” I said, for probably the tenth time. I picked at a scab of bark still clinging to the timber I sat on. “It’s perfectly all right. Really.”
Jamie was standing in front of me, the cove and the clouded sky bright behind him, his face shadowed.
“Sassenach,” he said mildly. “I’m a great deal more stubborn than you are, and ye ken that fine. Now, I know something upset ye when ye went to Beardsley’s place, and I know ye dinna want to tell me about it. Sometimes I ken ye need to fettle your mind about a matter before ye speak, but you’ve had time and more to do that—and I see that whatever it is is worse than I thought, or ye’d have said by now.”
I hesitated, trying to think of something to tell him that perhaps wasn’t quite … I looked up at him and decided that, no, I couldn’t lie to him—and not only because he’d be able to tell immediately that I was lying.
“Do you remember,” I said slowly, looking up at him, “on our wedding night? You told me you wouldn’t ask me to tell you things that I couldn’t. You said that love had room for secrets, but not for lies. I won’t lie to you, Jamie—but I really don’t want to tell you.”
He shifted his weight from one leg to the other and sighed.
“If ye think that’s going to relieve my mind, Sassenach …” he said, and shook his head. “I didna say that, anyway. I do remember the occasion—vividly”—and he smiled a little at me—“and what I said was that there was nothing between us then but respect—and that I thought respect maybe had room for secrets, but not for lies.”
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