The men returned at last just before nightfall, horses laden with bags containing the salt, needles, pickling spice, and other small items that Lallybroch could not produce for itself.
I heard one of the horses whinny as it came into the stableyard, and ran downstairs, meeting Jenny on her way out through the kitchens.
Relief swept through me as I saw Jamie’s tall figure, shadowed against the barn. I ran through the yard, disregarding the light covering of snow that lingered on the ground, and flung myself into his arms.
“Where the hell have you been?” I demanded.
He took time to kiss me before replying. His face was cold against mine, and his lips tasted faintly and pleasantly of whisky.
“Mm, sausage for supper?” he said approvingly, sniffing at my hair, which smelled of kitchen smoke. “Good, I’m fair starved.”
“Bangers and mash,” I said. “Where have you been?”
He laughed, shaking out his plaid to get the blown snow off. “Bangers and mash? That’s food, is it?”
“Sausages with mashed potatoes,” I translated. “A nice traditional English dish, hitherto unknown in the benighted reaches of Scotland. Now, you bloody Scot, where in hell have you been for the last two days? Jenny and I were worried!”
“Well, we had a wee accident—” Jamie began, when he spotted the small figure of Fergus, bearing a lantern. “Och, ye’ve brought a light, then, Fergus? Good lad. Set it there, where ye won’t set fire to the straw, and then take this poor beast into her stall. When ye’ve got her settled, come along to your own supper. You’ll be able to sit to it by now, I expect?” He aimed a friendly cuff at Fergus’s ear. The boy dodged and grinned back; apparently whatever had happened in the barn yesterday had left no hard feelings.
“Jamie,” I said, in measured tones. “If you don’t stop talking about horses and sausages and tell me what sort of accident you had, I am going to kick you in the shins. Which will be very hard on my toes, because I’m only wearing slippers, but I warn you, I’ll do it anyway.”
“That’s a threat, is it?” he said, laughing. “It wasna serious, Sassenach, only that—”
“Ian!” Jenny, delayed momentarily by Maggie, had just arrived, in time to see her husband step into the circle of lanternlight. Startled by the shock in her voice, I turned to see her dart forward and put a hand to Ian’s face.
“Whatever happened to ye, man?” she said. Plainly, whatever the accident had been, Ian had borne the brunt of it. One eye was blackened and swollen half-shut, and there was a long, raw scrape down the slope of one cheekbone.
“I’m all right, mi dhu,” he said, patting Jenny gently as she embraced him, little Maggie squeezed uncomfortably between them. “Only a bit bruised here and there.”
“We were comin’ down the slope of the hill two miles outside the village, leading the horses because the footing was bad, and Ian stepped in a molehole and broke his leg,” Jamie explained.
“The wooden one,” Ian amplified. He grinned, a little sheepishly. “The mole had a bit the best o’ that encounter.”
“So we stayed at a cottage nearby long enough to carve him a new one,” Jamie ended the story. “Can we eat? The sides of my belly are flapping together.”
We went in without further ado, and Mrs. Crook and I served the supper while Jenny bathed Ian’s face with witch hazel and made anxious inquiries about other injuries.
“It’s nothing,” he assured her. “Only bruises here and there.” I had watched him coming into the house, though, and seen that his normal limp was badly exaggerated. I had a few quiet words with Jenny as we cleared away the supper plates, and once we were settled in the parlor, the contents of the saddlebags safely disposed of, she knelt on the rug beside Ian and took hold of the new leg.
“Let’s have it off, then,” she said firmly. “You’ve hurt yourself, and I want Claire to look it over. She can maybe help ye more than I can.”
The original amputation had been done with some skill, and greater luck; the army surgeon who had taken the lower leg off had been able to save the knee joint. This gave Ian a great deal more flexibility of movement than he might otherwise have had. For the moment, though, the knee joint was more a liability than an advantage.
The fall had twisted his leg cruelly; the end of the stump was blue with bruising, and lacerated where the sharp edge of the cuff had pressed through the skin. It must have been agony to set any weight on it, even had all else been normal. As it was, the knee had twisted, too, and the flesh on the inside of the joint was swollen, red and hot.
Ian’s long, good-natured face was nearly as red as the injured joint. While perfectly matter-of-fact about his disability, I knew he hated the occasional helplessness it imposed. His embarrassment at being so exposed now was likely as painful to him as my touching of his leg.
“You’ve torn a ligament through here,” I told him, tracing the swelling inside his knee with a gentle finger. “I can’t tell how bad it is, but bad enough. You’ve got fluid inside the joint; that’s why it’s swollen.”
“Can ye help it, Sassenach?” Jamie was leaning over my shoulder, frowning worriedly at the angry-looking limb.
I shook my head. “Not a lot I can do for it, beyond cold compresses to reduce the swelling.” I looked up at Ian, fixing him with my best approximation of a Mother Hildegarde look.
“What you can do,” I said, “is stay in bed. You can have whisky for the pain tomorrow; tonight, I’ll give you laudanum so you can sleep. Keep off it for a week, at least, and we’ll see how it does.”
“I canna do that!” Ian protested. “There’s the stable wall needs mending, two dikes down in the upper field, and the ploughshares to be sharpened, and—”
“And a leg to mend, too,” said Jamie, firmly. He gave Ian what I privately called his “laird’s look,” a piercing blue glare that caused most people to leap to his bidding. Ian, who had shared meals, toys, hunting expeditions, fights, and thrashings with Jamie, was a good deal less susceptible than most people.
“The hell I will,” he said flatly. His hot brown eyes met Jamie’s with a look in which pain and anger mingled with resentment—and something else I didn’t recognize. “D’ye think ye can order me?”
Jamie sat back on his heels, flushing as though he’d been slapped. He bit back several obvious retorts, finally saying quietly, “No. I wilna try to order ye. May I ask ye, though—to care for yourself?”
A long look passed between the men, containing some message I couldn’t read. At last, Ian’s shoulders slumped as he relaxed, and he nodded, with a crooked smile.
“You can ask.” He sighed, and rubbed at the scrape on his cheekbone, wincing as he touched the abraded skin. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, then held out a hand to Jamie. “Help me up, then?”
It was an awkward job, getting a man with one leg up two flights of stairs, but it was managed at last. At the bedroom door, Jamie left Ian to Jenny. As he stepped back, Ian said something soft and quick to Jamie in Gaelic. I still was not proficient in the tongue, but I thought he had said, “Be well, brother.”
Jamie paused, looking back, and smiled, the candle lighting his eyes with warmth.
“You, too, mo brathair.”
I followed Jamie down the hall to our own room. I could tell from the slump of his shoulders that he was tired, but I had a few questions I wanted to ask before he fell asleep.
“It’s only bruises here and there,” Ian had said, reassuring Jenny. It was. Here and there. Besides the bruises on his face and leg, I had seen the darkened marks that lay half-hidden under the collar of his shirt. No matter how much Ian’s intrusion had been resented, I couldn’t imagine a mole trying to strangle him in retaliation.
* * *
In the event, Jamie didn’t want to sleep at once.
“Oh, absence makes the heart grow fonder, does it?” I said. The bed, so vast the night before, now seemed scarcely big enough.
“Mm?” he said, eyes half-closed in cont
ent. “Oh, the heart? Aye, that, too. Oh, God, don’t stop; that feels wonderful.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll do it some more,” I assured him. “Let me put out the candle, though.” I rose and blew it out; with the shutters left open, there was plenty of light reflected into the room from the snowy sky, even without the candle’s flame. I could see Jamie clearly, the long shape of his body relaxed beneath the quilts, hands curled half-open at his side. I crawled in beside him and took up his right hand, resuming my slow massage of his fingers and palm.
He gave a long sigh, almost a groan, as I rubbed a thumb in firm circles over the pads at the base of his fingers. Stiffened by hours of clenching around his horse’s reins, the fingers warmed and relaxed slowly under my touch. The house was quiet, and the room cold, outside the sanctuary of the bed. It was pleasant to feel the length of his body warming the space beside me, and enjoy the intimacy of touch, with no immediate feeling of demand. In time, this touch might token more; it was winter, and the nights were long. He was there; so was I, and content with things as they were for the moment.
“Jamie,” I said, after a time, “who hurt Ian?”
He didn’t open his eyes, but gave a long sigh before answering. He didn’t stiffen in resistance, though; he had been expecting the question.
“I did,” he said.
“What?” I dropped his hand in shock. He closed his fist and opened it, testing the movement of his fingers. Then he laid his left hand on the counter-pane beside it, showing me the knuckles, slightly puffed by contact with the protuberances of Ian’s bony countenance.
“Why?” I said, appalled. I could tell that there was something new and edgy between Jamie and Ian, though it didn’t look exactly like hostility. I couldn’t imagine what might have made Jamie strike Ian; his brother-in-law was nearly as close to him as was his sister, Jenny.
Jamie’s eyes were open now, but not looking at me. He rubbed his knuckles restlessly, looking down at them. Aside from the mild bruising of his knuckles, there were no marks on Jamie; apparently Ian hadn’t fought back.
“Well, Ian’s been married too long,” he said defensively.
“I’d say you’d been out in the sun too long,” I remarked, staring at him, “except that there isn’t any. Have you got a fever?”
“No,” he said, evading my attempts to feel his forehead. “No, it’s only—stop that, Sassenach, I’m all right.” He pressed his lips together, but then gave up and told me the whole story.
Ian had in fact broken his wooden leg by stepping into a molehole near Broch Mordha.
“It was near evening—we’d had a lot to do in the village—and snowing. And I could see Ian’s leg was paining him a lot, even though he kept insisting he could ride. Anyway, there were two or three cottages near, so I got him up on one of the ponies, and brought him up the slope to beg shelter for the night.”
With characteristic Highland hospitality, both shelter and supper were offered with alacrity, and after a warm bowl of brose and fresh oatcake, both visitors had been accommodated with a pallet before the fire.
“There was scarce room to lay a quilt by the hearth, and we were squeezed a bit, but we lay down side by side and made ourselves as comfortable as might be.” He drew a deep breath, and looked at me half-shyly.
“Well, I was worn out by the journey, and slept deep, and I suppose Ian did the same. But he’s slept every night wi’ Jenny for the last five years, and I suppose, havin’ a warm body next to him in the bed—well, somewhere in the night, he rolled toward me, put his arm about me and kissed me on the back o’ the neck. And I”—he hesitated, and I could see the deep color flood his face, even in the grayish light of the snow-lit room—“I woke from a sound sleep, thinking he was Jack Randall.”
I had been holding my breath through this story; now I let it out slowly.
“That must have been the hell of a shock,” I said.
One side of Jamie’s mouth twitched. “It was the hell of a shock to Ian, I’ll tell ye,” he said. “I rolled over and punched him in the face, and by the time I came all the way to myself, I was on top of him, throttling him, wi’ his tongue sticking out of his head. Hell of a shock to the Murrays in the bed, too,” he added reflectively. “I told them I’d had a nightmare—well, I had, in a way—but it caused the hell of a stramash, what wi’ the bairns shriekin’, and Ian choking in the corner, and Mrs. Murray sittin’ bolt upright in bed, sayin’ ‘Who, who?’ like a wee fat owl.”
I laughed despite myself at the image.
“Oh God, Jamie. Was Ian all right?”
Jamie shrugged a little. “Well, ye saw him. Everyone went back to sleep, after a time, and I just lay before the fire for the rest of the night, staring at the roof beams.” He didn’t resist as I picked up his left hand, gently stroking the bruised knuckles. His fingers closed over mine, holding them.
“So when we left the next morning,” he went on, “I waited ’til we’d come to a spot where ye can sit and look over the valley below. And then”—he swallowed, and his hand tightened slightly on mine—“I told him. About Randall. And everything that happened.”
I began to understand the ambiguity of the look Ian had given Jamie. And I now understood the look of strain on Jamie’s face, and the smudges under his eyes. Not knowing what to say, I just squeezed his hands.
“I hadna thought I’d ever tell anyone—anyone but you,” he added, returning the squeeze. He smiled briefly, then pulled one hand away to rub his face.
“But Ian … well, he’s …” He groped for the right word. “He knows me, d’ye see?”
“I think so. You’ve known him all your life, haven’t you?”
He nodded, looking sightlessly out the window. The swirling snow had begun to fall again, small flakes dancing against the pane, whiter than the sky.
“He’s only a year older than me. When I was growing, he was always there. Until I was fourteen, there wasna a day went by when I didna see Ian. And even later, after I’d gone to foster wi’ Dougal, and to Leoch, and then later still to Paris, to university—when I’d come back, I’d walk round a corner and there he would be, and it would be like I’d never left. He’d just smile when he saw me, like he always did, and then we’d be walkin’ away together, side by side, ower the fields and the streams, talkin’ of everything.” He sighed deeply, and rubbed a hand through his hair.
“Ian … he’s the part of me that belongs here, that never left,” he said, struggling to explain. “I thought … I must tell him; I didna want to feel … apart. From Ian. From here.” He gestured toward the window, then turned toward me, eyes dark in the dim light. “D’ye see why?”
“I think so,” I said again, softly. “Did Ian?”
He made that small, uncomfortable shrugging motion, as though easing a shirt too tight across his back. “Well, I couldna tell. At first, when I began to tell him, he just kept shaking his head, as though he couldna believe me, and then when he did—” He paused and licked his lips, and I had some idea of just how much that confession in the snow had cost him. “I could see he wanted to jump to his feet and stamp back and forth, but he couldn’t, because of his leg. His fists were knotted up, and his face was white, and he kept saying ‘How? Damn ye, Jamie, how could ye let him do it?’ ”
He shook his head. “I dinna remember what I said. Or what he said. We shouted at each other, I know that much. And I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t, because of his leg. And he wanted to hit me, but couldn’t—because of his leg.” He gave a brief snort of laughter. “Christ, we must ha’ looked a rare pair of fools, wavin’ our arms and shouting at each other. But I shouted longer, and finally he shut up and listened to the end of it.
“Then all of a sudden, I couldna go on talking; it just seemed like no use. And I sat down all at once on a rock, and put my head in my hands. Then after a time, Ian said we’d best be going on. And I nodded, and got up, and helped him on his horse, and we started off again, not speakin’ to each other.”
Jam
ie seemed suddenly to realize how tightly he was holding my hand. He released his grip, but continued to hold my hand, turning my wedding ring between his thumb and forefinger.
“We rode for a long time,” he said softly. “And then I heard a small sound behind me, and reined up so Ian’s horse came alongside, and I could see he’d been weeping—still was, wi’ the tears streaming down his face. And he saw me look at him, and shook his head hard, as if he was still angry, but then he held out his hand to me. I took it, and he gave me a squeeze, hard enough to break the bones. Then he let go, and we came on home.”
I could feel the tension go out of him, with the ending of the story. “Be well, brother,” Ian had said, balanced on his one leg in the bedroom door.
“It’s all right, then?” I asked.
“It will be.” He relaxed completely now, sinking back into the goose-down pillows. I slid down under the quilts beside him, and lay close, fitted against his side. We watched the snow fall, hissing softly against the glass.
“I’m glad you’re safe home,” I said.
* * *
I woke to the same gray light in the morning. Jamie, already dressed for the day, was standing by the window.
“Oh, you’re awake, Sassenach?” he said, seeing me lift my head from the pillow. “That’s good. I brought ye a present.”
He reached into his sporran and pulled out several copper doits, two or three small rocks, a short stick wrapped with fishline, a crumpled letter, and a tangle of hair ribbons.
“Hair ribbons?” I said. “Thank you; they’re lovely.”
“No, those aren’t for you,” he said, frowning as he disentanged the blue strands from the mole’s foot he carried as a charm against rheumatism. “They’re for wee Maggie.” He squinted dubiously at the rocks remaining in his palm. To my astonishment, he picked one up and licked it.
“No, not that one,” he muttered, and dived back into his sporran.
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” I inquired with interest, watching this performance. He didn’t answer, but came out with another handful of rocks, which he sniffed at, discarding them one by one until he came to a nodule that struck his fancy. This one he licked once, for certainty, then dropped it into my hand, beaming.
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