Curious, I slipped out of bed and crept quietly to the door. I could see them there at the end of the hall. Jamie sat leaning back against the side of the window seat, wearing only his shirt. His bare legs were raised, forming a back against which small Katherine Mary rested as she sat facing him in his lap, her own chubby legs kicking restlessly over his stomach.
The baby’s face was blank and light as the moon’s, her eyes dark pools absorbing his words. He traced the curve of her cheek with one finger, again and again, whispering with heartbreaking gentleness.
He spoke in Gaelic, and so low that I could not have told what he said, even had I known the words. But the whispering voice was thick, and the moonlight from the casement behind him showed the tracks of the tears that slid unregarded down his own cheeks.
It was not a scene that bore intrusion. I came back to the still-warm bed, holding in my mind the picture of the laird of Lallybroch, half-naked in the moonlight, pouring out his heart to an unknown future, holding in his lap the promise of his blood.
* * *
When I woke in the morning, there was a warm, unfamiliar scent next to me, and something tangled in my hair. I opened my eyes to find Katherine Mary’s rosebud lips smacking dreamily an inch from my nose, her fat fingers clutched in the hair above my left ear. I cautiously disengaged myself, and she stirred, but flopped over onto her stomach, drew her knees up and went back to sleep.
Jamie was lying on the other side of the child, face half-buried in his pillow. He opened one eye, clear blue as the morning sky.
“Good morning, Sassenach,” he said, speaking quietly so as not to disturb the small sleeper. He smiled at me as I sat up in bed. “Ye looked verra sweet, the two of you, asleep face-to-face like that.”
I ran a hand through my tangled hair, and smiled myself at Kitty’s upturned bottom, jutting absurdly into the air.
“That doesn’t look at all comfortable,” I observed. “But she’s still asleep, so it can’t be that bad. How late were you up with her last night? I didn’t hear you come to bed.”
He yawned and ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it away from his face. There were shadows under his eyes, but he seemed peacefully content.
“Oh, some time. Before moonset, at least. I didna want to wake Jenny by taking the wean back to her, so I laid her in the bed between us, and she didna twitch once, the rest of the night.”
The baby was kneading the mattress with elbows and knees, rootling in the bedclothes with a low grunting noise. It must be close to time for her morning feed. This supposition was borne out in the next moment, when she raised her head, eyes still tight shut, and let out a healthy howl. I reached hastily for her and picked her up.
“There-there-there,” I soothed, patting the straining little back. I swung my legs out of bed, then reached back and patted Jamie on the head. The rough bright hair was warm under my hand.
“I’ll take her to Jenny,” I said. “It’s early yet; you sleep some more.”
“I may do that, Sassenach,” Jamie said, flinching at the noise. “I’ll see ye at breakfast, shall I?” He rolled onto his back, crossed his hands on his chest in his favorite sleeping posture, and was breathing deeply again by the time Katherine Mary and I had reached the door.
The baby squirmed vigorously, rooting for a nipple and squawking in frustration when none was immediately forthcoming. Hurrying along the hall, I met Jenny, hurrying out of her bedroom in response to her offspring’s cries, pulling on a green dressing gown as she came. I held out the baby, waving little fists in urgent demand.
“There, mo mùirninn, hush now, hush,” Jenny soothed. With a cock of the eyebrow in invitation, she took the child from me and turned back into her room.
I followed her in and sat on the rumpled bed as she sat down on a nursing stool by the hearth and hastily bared one breast. The yowling little mouth clamped at once on to a nipple and we all relaxed in relief as sudden silence descended.
“Ah,” Jenny sighed. Her shoulders slumped a fraction as the flow of milk started. “That’s better, my wee piggie, no?” She opened her eyes and smiled at me, eyes clear and blue as her brother’s.
“ ’Twas kind of ye to keep the lassie all night; I slept like the dead.”
I shrugged, smiling at the picture of mother and child, relaxed together in total content. The curve of the baby’s head exactly echoed the high, round curve of Jenny’s breast and small, slurping noises came from the little bundle as her body sagged against her mother’s, fitting easily into the curve of Jenny’s lap.
“It was Jamie, not me,” I said. “He and his niece seem to have got on well together.” The picture of them came back to me, Jamie talking in earnest, low tones to the child, tears slipping down his face.
Jenny nodded, watching my face.
“Aye. I thought perhaps they’d comfort each other a bit. He doesna sleep well these days?” Her voice held a question.
“No,” I answered softly. “He has a lot on his mind.”
“Well he might,” she said, glancing at the bed behind me. Ian was gone already, risen at dawn to see to the stock in the barn. The horses that could be spared from the farming—and some that couldn’t—needed shoeing, needed harness, in preparation for their journey to rebellion.
“You can talk to a babe, ye ken,” she said suddenly, breaking into my thought. “Really talk, I mean. Ye can tell them anything, no matter how foolish it would sound did ye say it to a soul could understand ye.”
“Oh. You heard him, then?” I asked. She nodded, eyes on the curve of Katherine’s cheek, where the tiny dark lashes lay against the fair skin, eyes closed in ecstasy.
“Aye. Ye shouldna worrit yourself,” she added, smiling gently at me. “It isna that he feels he canna talk to you; he knows he can. But it’s different to talk to a babe that way. It’s a person; ye ken that you’re not alone. But they dinna ken your words, and ye don’t worry a bit what they’ll think of ye, or what they may feel they must do. You can pour out your heart to them wi’out choosing your words, or keeping anything back at all—and that’s a comfort to the soul.”
She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were something that everyone knew. I wondered whether she spoke that way often to her child. The generous wide mouth, so like her brother’s, lifted slightly at one side.
“It’s the way ye talk to them before they’re born,” she said softly. “You’ll know?”
I placed my hands gently over my belly, one atop the other, remembering.
“Yes, I know.”
She pressed a thumb against the baby’s cheek, breaking the suction, and with a deft movement, shifted the small body to bring the full breast within reach.
“I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they’re born, and they’re different—not the way ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o’ course, and get to know them the way they are … but still, there’s the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the grievin’ for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.” She dipped her head and kissed her daughter’s downy skull.
“Yes,” I said. “Before … it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is.”
She rocked gently back and forth, and the small clutching hand that seized the folds of green silk over her breast began to loose its grip.
“And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead,” she said quietly. “And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn’t know, that’s gone for good, until you know the child you have, and then at last it’s as though they could never have b
een other than they are, and ye feel naught but joy in them. But ’til then, ye weep easy.”
“And men …” I said, thinking of Jamie, whispering secrets to the unhearing ears of the child.
“Aye. They hold their bairns, and they feel all the things that might be, and the things that will never be. But it isna so easy for a man to weep for the things he doesna ken.”
PART SIX
The Flames of Rebellion
36
PRESTONPANS
Scotland, September 1745
Four days’ march found us on the crest of a hill near Calder. A sizable moor stretched out at the foot of the hill, but we set up camp within the shelter of the trees above. There were two small streams cutting through the moss-covered rock of the hillside, and the crisp weather of early fall made it seem much more like picnicking than a march to war.
But it was the seventeenth of September, and if my sketchy knowledge of Jacobite history was correct, war it would be, in a matter of days.
“Tell it to me again, Sassenach,” Jamie had said, for the dozenth time, as we made our way along the winding trails and dirt roads. I rode Donas, while Jamie walked alongside, but now slid down to walk beside him, to make conversation easier. While Donas and I had reached an understanding of sorts, he was the kind of horse that demanded your full concentration to ride; he was all too fond of scraping an unwary rider off by walking under low branches, for example.
“I told you before, I don’t know that much,” I said. “There was very little written about it in the history books, and I didn’t pay a great deal of attention at the time. All I can tell you is that the battle was fought—er, will be fought—near the town of Preston, and so it’s called the Battle of Prestonpans, though the Scots called—call—it the Battle of Gladsmuir, because of an old prophecy that the returning king will be victorious at Gladsmuir. Heaven knows where the real Gladsmuir is, if there is one.”
“Aye. And?”
I furrowed my brow, trying to recall every last scrap of information. I could conjure a mental picture of the small, tattered brown copy of A Child’s History of England, read by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern in a mud hut somewhere in Persia. Mentally flicking the pages, I could just recall the two-page section that was all the author had seen fit to devote to the second Jacobite Rising, known to historians as “the ’45.” And within that two-page section, the single paragraph dealing with the battle we were about to fight.
“The Scots win,” I said helpfully.
“Well, that’s the important point,” he agreed, a bit sarcastically, “but it would be a bit of help to know a little more.”
“If you wanted prophecy, you should have gotten a seer,” I snapped, then relented. “I’m sorry. It’s only that I don’t know much, and it’s very frustrating.”
“Aye, it is.” He reached down and took my hand, squeezing it as he smiled at me. “Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. Ye canna say more than ye know, but tell me it all, just once more.”
“All right.” I squeezed back, and we walked on, hand in hand. “It was a remarkable victory,” I began, reading from my mental page, “because the Jacobites were so greatly outnumbered. They surprised General Cope’s army at dawn—they charged out of the rising sun, I remember that—and it was a rout. There were hundreds of casualties on the English side, and only a few from the Jacobite side—thirty men, that was it. Only thirty men killed.”
Jamie glanced behind us, at the straggling tail of the Lallybroch men, strung out as they walked along the road, chatting and singing in small groups. Thirty men was what we had brought from Lallybroch. It didn’t seem that small a number, looking at them. But I had seen the battlefields of Alsace-Lorraine, and the acres of meadowland converted to muddy boneyards by the burial of the thousands slain.
“Taken all in all,” I said, feeling faintly apologetic, “I’m afraid it was really rather … unimportant, historically speaking.”
Jamie blew out his breath through pursed lips, and looked down at me rather bleakly.
“Unimportant. Aye, well.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault, Sassenach.”
But I couldn’t help feeling that it was, somehow.
* * *
The men sat around the fire after their supper, lazily enjoying the feeling of full stomachs, exchanging stories and scratching. The scratching was endemic; close quarters and lack of hygiene made body lice so common as to excite no remark when one man detached a representative specimen from a fold of his plaid and tossed it into the fire. The louse flamed for an instant, one among the sparks of the fire, and then was gone.
The young man they called Kincaid—his name was Alexander, but there were so many Alexanders that most of them ended up being called by nicknames or middle names—seemed particularly afflicted with the scourge this evening. He dug viciously under one arm, into his curly brown hair, then—with a quick glance to see whether I was looking in his direction—at his crotch.
“Got ’em bad, have ye, lad?” Ross the smith observed sympathetically.
“Aye,” he answered, “the wee buggers are eatin’ me alive.”
“Bloody hell to get out of your cock hairs,” Wallace Fraser observed, scratching himself in sympathy. “Gives me the yeuk to watch ye, laddie.”
“D’ye ken the best way to rid yourself o’ the wee beasties?” Sorley McClure asked helpfully, and at Kincaid’s negative shake of the head, leaned forward and carefully pulled a flaming stick from the fire.
“Lift your kilt a moment, laddie, and I’ll smoke ’em out for ye,” he offered, to catcalls and jeers of laughter from the men.
“Bloody farmer,” Murtagh grumbled. “And what would ye know about it?”
“You know a better way?” Wallace raised thick brows skeptically, wrinkling the tanned skin of his balding forehead.
“O’ course.” He drew his dirk with a flourish. “The laddie’s a soldier now; let him do it like a soldier does.”
Kincaid’s open face was guileless and eager. “How’s that?”
“Weel, verra simple. Ye take your dirk, lift your plaidie, and shave off half the hairs on your crutch.” He raised the dirk warningly. “Only half, mind.”
“Half? Aye, well …” Kincaid looked doubtful, but was paying close attention. I could see the grins of anticipation broadening on the faces of the men around the fire, but no one was laughing yet.
“Then …” Murtagh gestured at Sorley and his stick. “Then, laddie, ye set the other half on fire, and when the beasties rush out, ye spear them wi’ your dirk.”
Kincaid blushed hotly enough to be seen even by firelight as the circle of men erupted in hoots and roars. There was a good deal of rude shoving as a couple of the men pretended to try the fire cure on each other, brandishing flaming billets of wood. Just as it seemed that the horseplay was getting out of hand, and likely to lead to blows in earnest, Jamie returned from hobbling the animals. He stepped into the circle, and tossed a stone bottle from under one arm to Kincaid. Another went to Murtagh, and the shoving died down.
“Ye’re fools, the lot o’ ye,” he declared. “The second best way to rid yourself of lice is to pour whisky on them and get them drunk. When they’ve fallen down snoring, then ye stand up and they’ll drop straight off.”
“Second best, eh?” said Ross. “And what’s the best way, sir, and I might ask?”
Jamie smiled indulgently round the circle, like a parent amused by the antics of his children.
“Why, let your wife pick them off ye, one by one.” He cocked an elbow and bowed to me, one eyebrow raised. “If you’d oblige me, my lady?”
* * *
While put forward as a joke, individual removal was in fact the only effective method of ridding oneself of lice. I fine-combed my own hair—all of it—morning and evening, washed it with yarrow whenever we paused near water deep enough to bathe in, and had so far avoided any serious infestations. Aware that I would remain louseless only
so long as Jamie did, I administered the same treatment to him, whenever I could get him to sit still long enough.
“Baboons do this all the time,” I remarked, delicately disentangling a foxtail from his thick red mane. “But I believe they eat the fruits of their labors.”
“Dinna let me prevent ye, Sassenach, and ye feel so inclined,” he responded. He hunched his shoulders slightly in pleasure as the comb slid through the thick, glossy strands. The firelight filled my hands with a cascade of sparks and golden streaks of fire. “Mm. Ye wouldna think it felt so nice to have someone comb your hair for ye.”
“Wait ’til I get to the rest of it,” I said, tweaking him familiarly and making him giggle. “Tempted though I am to try Murtagh’s suggestion instead.”
“Touch my cock hairs wi’ a torch, and you’ll get the same treatment,” he threatened. “What was it Louise de La Tour says bald lassies are?”
“Erotic.” I leaned forward and nipped the upper flange of one ear between my teeth.
“Mmmphm.”
“Well, tastes differ,” I said. “Chacun à son gout, and all that.”
“A bloody French sentiment, and I ever heard one.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
A loud, rolling growl interrupted my labors. I laid down the comb and peered ostentatiously into the tree-filled shadows.
“Either,” I said, “there are bears in this wood, or … why haven’t you eaten?”
“I was busy wi’ the beasts,” he answered. “One of the ponies has a cracked hoof and I had to bind it with a poultice. Not that I’ve so much appetite, what wi’ all this talk of eating lice.”
“What sort of poultice do you use on a horse’s hoof?” I asked, ignoring this remark.
“Different things; fresh dung will do in a pinch. I used chewed vetch leaves mixed wi’ honey this time.”
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