“There’s a stone there to mark the border, maybe you’ll know; it looks the sort of stone to last a while.” He glanced at me, questioning, and I nodded. I did know it; a huge menhir, some ten feet tall. In my time, someone had carved on its one face ENGLAND, and on the other, SCOTLAND.
There he stopped to rest, as thousands of travelers had stopped over the years, his exiled past behind him, the future—and home—below and beyond, past the hazy green hollows of the Lowlands, up into the gray crags of the Highlands, hidden by fog.
His good hand ran back and forth through his hair, as it always did when he thought, leaving the cowlicks on top standing up in small, bright whorls.
“You’ll not know how it is, to live among strangers for so long.”
“Won’t I?” I said, with some sharpness. He glanced up at me, startled, then smiled faintly, looking down at the coverlet.
“Aye, maybe ye will,” he said. “Ye change, no? Much as ye want to keep the memories of home, and who ye are—you’re changed. Not one of the strangers; ye could never be that, even if ye wanted to. But different from who ye were, too.”
I thought of myself, standing silent beside Frank, a bit of flotsam in the eddies of university parties, pushing a pram through the chilly parks of Boston, playing bridge and talking with other wives and mothers, speaking the foreign language of middle-class domesticity. Strangers indeed.
“Yes,” I said. “I know. Get on.”
He sighed, rubbing his nose with a forefinger. “So I came back,” he said. He looked up, a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth. “What is it ye told wee Ian? ‘Home is the place where, when ye have to go there, they have to take ye in’?”
“That’s it,” I said. “It’s a quotation from a poet called Frost. But what do you mean? Surely your family was glad to see you!”
He frowned, fingering the quilt. “Aye, they were,” he said slowly. “It’s not that—I dinna mean they made me feel unwelcome, not at all. But I had been away so long—Michael and wee Janet and Ian didna even remember me.” He smiled ruefully. “They’d heard about me, though. When I came into the kitchen, they’d squash back against the walls and stare at me, wi’ their eyes gone round.”
He leaned forward a little, intent on making me understand.
“See, it was different, when I hid in the cave. I wasna in the house, and they seldom saw me, but I was always here, I was always part of them. I hunted for them; I kent when they were hungry, or cold, or when the goats were ill or the kail crop poor, or a new draft under the kitchen door.
“Then I went to prison,” he said abruptly. “And to England. I wrote to them—and they to me—but it canna be the same, to see a few black words on the paper, telling things that happened months before.
“And when I came back—” He shrugged, wincing as the movement jarred his arm. “It was different. Ian would ask me what I thought of fencing in auld Kirby’s pasture, but I’d know he’d already set Young Jamie to do it. I’d walk through the fields, and folk would squint at me, suspicious, thinking me a stranger. Then their eyes would go big as they’d seen a ghost, when they knew me.”
He stopped, looking out at the window, where the brambles of his mother’s rose beat against the glass as the wind changed. “I was a ghost, I think.” He glanced at me shyly. “If ye ken what I mean.”
“Maybe,” I said. Rain was streaking the glass, with drops the same gray as the sky outside.
“You feel like your ties to the earth are broken,” I said softly. “Floating through rooms without feeling your footsteps. Hearing people speak to you, and not making sense of it. I remember that—before Bree was born.” But I had had one tie then; I had her, to anchor me to life.
He nodded, not looking at me, and then was quiet for a minute. The peat fire hissed on the hearth behind me, smelling of the Highlands, and the rich scent of cock-a-leekie and baking bread spread through the house, warm and comforting as a blanket.
“I was here,” he said softly, “but not home.”
I could feel the pull of it around me—the house, the family, the place itself. I, who couldn’t remember a childhood home, felt the urge to sit down here and stay forever, enmeshed in the thousand strands of daily life, bound securely to this bit of earth. What would it have meant to him, who had lived all his life in the strength of that bond, endured his exile in the hope of coming back to it, and then arrived to find himself still rootless?
“And I suppose I was lonely,” he said quietly. He lay still on the pillow, eyes closed.
“I suppose you were,” I said, careful to let no tone either of sympathy or condemnation show. I knew something of loneliness, too.
He opened his eyes then, and met my gaze with a naked honesty. “Aye, there was that too,” he said. “Not the main thing, no—but aye, that too.”
Jenny had tried, with varying degrees of gentleness and insistence, to persuade him to marry again. She had tried intermittently since the days after Culloden, presenting first one and then another personable young widow, this and that sweet-tempered virgin, all to no avail. Now, bereft of the feelings that had sustained him so far, desperately seeking some sense of connection—he had listened.
“Laoghaire was married to Hugh MacKenzie, one of Colum’s tacksmen,” he said, eyes closed once more. “Hugh was killed at Culloden, though, and two years later, Laoghaire married Simon MacKimmie of clan Fraser. The two lassies—Marsali and Joan—they’re his. The English arrested him a few years later, and took him to prison in Edinburgh.” He opened his eyes, looking up at the dark ceiling beams overhead. “He had a good house, and property worth seizing. That was enough to make a Highland man a traitor, then, whether he’d fought for the Stuarts openly or not.” His voice was growing hoarse, and he stopped to clear his throat.
“Simon wasn’t as lucky as I was. He died in prison, before they could bring him to trial. The Crown tried for some time to take the estate, but Ned Gowan went to Edinburgh, and spoke for Laoghaire, and he managed to save the main house and a little money, claiming it was her dower right.”
“Ned Gowan?” I spoke with mingled surprise and pleasure. “He can’t still be alive, surely?” It was Ned Gowan, a small and elderly solicitor who advised the MacKenzie clan on legal matters, who had saved me from being burned as a witch, twenty years before. I had thought him quite ancient then.
Jamie smiled, seeing my pleasure. “Oh, aye. I expect they’ll have to knock him on the head wi’ an ax to kill him. He looks just the same as he always did, though he must be past seventy now.”
“Does he still live at Castle Leoch?”
He nodded, reaching to the table for the tumbler of water. He drank awkwardly, right-handed, and set it back.
“What’s left of it. Aye, though he’s traveled a great deal these last years, appealing treason cases and filing lawsuits to recover property.” Jamie’s smile had a bitter edge. “There’s a saying, aye? ‘After a war, first come the corbies to eat the flesh; and then the lawyers, to pick the bones.’ ”
His right hand went to his left shoulder, massaging it unconsciously.
“No, he’s a good man, is Ned, in spite of his profession. He goes back and forth to Inverness, to Edinburgh—sometimes even to London or Paris. And he stops here from time to time, to break his journey.”
It was Ned Gowan who had mentioned Laoghaire to Jenny, returning from Balriggan to Edinburgh. Pricking up her ears, Jenny had inquired for further details, and finding these satisfactory, had at once sent an invitation to Balriggan, for Laoghaire and her two daughters to come to Lallybroch for Hogmanay, which was near.
The house was bright that night, with candles lit in the windows, and bunches of holly and ivy fixed to the staircase and the doorposts. There were not so many pipers in the Highlands as there had been before Culloden, but one had been found, and a fiddler as well, and music floated up the stairwell, mixed with the heady scent of rum punch, plum cake, almond squirts, and Savoy biscuits.
Jamie had come down
late and hesitant. Many people here he had not seen in nearly ten years, and he was not eager to see them now, feeling changed and distant as he did. But Jenny had made him a new shirt, brushed and mended his coat, and combed his hair smooth and plaited it for him before going downstairs to see to the cooking. He had no excuse to linger, and at last had come down, into the noise and swirl of the gathering.
“Mister Fraser!” Peggy Gibbons was the first to see him; she hurried across the room, face glowing, and threw her arms about him, quite unabashed. Taken by surprise, he hugged her back, and within moments was surrounded by a small crowd of women, exclaiming over him, holding up small children born since his departure, kissing his cheeks and patting his hands.
The men were shyer, greeting him with a gruff word of welcome or a slap on the back as he made his way slowly through the rooms, until, quite overwhelmed, he had escaped temporarily into the laird’s study.
Once his father’s room, and then his own, it now belonged to his brother-in-law, who had run Lallybroch through the years of his absence. The ledgers and stockbooks and accounts were all lined up neatly on the edge of the battered desk; he ran a finger along the leather spines, feeling a sense of comfort at the touch. It was all in here; the planting and the harvests, the careful purchases and acquisitions, the slow accumulations and dispersals that were the rhythm of life to the tenants of Lallybroch.
On the small bookshelf, he found his wooden snake. Along with everything else of value, he had left it behind when he went to prison. A small icon carved of cherrywood, it had been the gift of his elder brother, dead in childhood. He was sitting in the chair behind the desk, stroking the snake’s well-worn curves, when the door of the study opened.
“Jamie?” she had said, hanging shyly back. He had not bothered to light a lamp in the study; she was silhouetted by the candles burning in the hall. She wore her pale hair loose, like a maid, and the light shone through it, haloing her unseen face.
“You’ll remember me, maybe?” she had said, tentative, reluctant to come into the room without invitation.
“Aye,” he said, after a pause. “Aye, of course I do.”
“The music’s starting,” she said. It was; he could hear the whine of the fiddle and the stamp of feet from the front parlor, along with an occasional shout of merriment. It showed signs of being a good party already; most of the guests would be asleep on the floor come morning.
“Your sister says you’re a bonny dancer,” she said, still shy, but determined.
“It will ha’ been some time since I tried,” he said, feeling shy himself, and painfully awkward, though the fiddle music ached in his bones and his feet twitched at the sound of it.
“It’s ‘Tha mo Leabaidh ’san Fhraoch’—‘In the Heather’s my Bed’—you’ll ken that one. Will ye come and try wi’ me?” She had held out a hand to him, small and graceful in the half-dark. And he had risen, clasped her outstretched hand in his own, and taken his first steps in pursuit of himself.
“It was in here,” he said, waving his good hand at the room where we sat. “Jenny had had the furniture cleared away, all but one table wi’ the food and the whisky, and the fiddler stood by the window there, wi’ a new moon over his shoulder.” He nodded at the window, where the rose vine trembled. Something of the light of that Hogmanay feast lingered on his face, and I felt a small pang, seeing it.
“We danced all that night, sometimes wi’ others, but mostly with each other. And at the dawn, when those still awake went to the end o’ the house to see what omens the New Year might bring, the two of us went, too. The single women took it in turns to spin about, and walk through the door wi’ their eyes closed, then spin again and open their eyes to see what the first thing they might see would be—for that tells them about the man they’ll marry, ye ken.”
There had been a lot of laughter, as the guests, heated by whisky and dancing, pushed and shoved at the door. Laoghaire had held back, flushed and laughing, saying it was a game for young girls, and not for a matron of thirty-four, but the others had insisted, and try she had. Spun three times clockwise and opened the door, stepped out into the cold dawnlight and spun again. And when she opened her eyes, they had rested on Jamie’s face, wide with expectation.
“So … there she was, a widow wi’ two bairns. She needed a man, that was plain enough. I needed … something.” He gazed into the fire, where the low flame glimmered through the red mass of the peat; heat without much light. “I supposed that we might help each other.”
They had married quietly at Balriggan, and he had moved his few possessions there. Less than a year later, he had moved out again, and gone to Edinburgh.
“What on earth happened?” I asked, more than curious.
He looked up at me, helpless.
“I canna say. It wasna that anything was wrong, exactly—only that nothing was right.” He rubbed a hand tiredly between his brows. “It was me, I think; my fault. I always disappointed her somehow. We’d sit down to supper and all of a sudden the tears would well up in her eyes, and she’d leave the table sobbing, and me sitting there wi’ not a notion what I’d done or said wrong.”
His fist clenched on the coverlet, then relaxed. “God, I never knew what to do for her, or what to say! Anything I said just made it worse, and there would be days—nay, weeks!—when she’d not speak to me, but only turn away when I came near her, and stand staring out the window until I went away again.”
His fingers went to the parallel scratches down the side of his neck. They were nearly healed now, but the marks of my nails still showed on his fair skin. He looked at me wryly.
“You never did that to me, Sassenach.”
“Not my style,” I agreed, smiling faintly. “If I’m mad at you, you’ll bloody know why, at least.”
He snorted briefly and lay back on his pillows. Neither of us spoke for a bit. Then he said, staring up at the ceiling, “I thought I didna want to hear anything about what it was like—wi’ Frank, I mean. I was maybe wrong about that.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” I said. “But not just now. It’s still your turn.”
He sighed and closed his eyes.
“She was afraid of me,” he said softly, a minute later. “I tried to be gentle wi’ her—God, I tried again and again, everything I knew to please a woman. But it was no use.”
His head turned restlessly, making a hollow in the feather pillow.
“Maybe it was Hugh, or maybe Simon. I kent them both, and they were good men, but there’s no telling what goes on in a marriage bed. Maybe it was bearing the children; not all women can stand it. But something hurt her, sometime, and I couldna heal it for all my trying. She shrank away when I touched her, and I could see the sickness and the fear in her eyes.” There were lines of sorrow around his own closed eyes, and I reached impulsively for his hand.
He squeezed it gently and opened his eyes. “That’s why I left, finally,” he said softly. “I couldna bear it anymore.”
I didn’t say anything, but went on holding his hand, putting a finger on his pulse to check it. His heartbeat was reassuringly slow and steady.
He shifted slightly in the bed, moving his shoulders and making a grimace of discomfort as he did so.
“Arm hurt a lot?” I asked.
“A bit.”
I bent over him, feeling his brow. He was very warm, but not feverish. There was a line between the thick ruddy brows, and I smoothed it with a knuckle.
“Head ache?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll go and make you some willow-bark tea.” I made to rise, but his hand on my arm stopped me.
“I dinna need tea,” he said. “It would ease me, though, if maybe I could lay my head in your lap, and have ye rub my temples a bit?” Blue eyes looked up at me, limpid as a spring sky.
“You don’t fool me a bit, Jamie Fraser,” I said. “I’m not going to forget about your next shot.” Nonetheless, I was already moving the chair out of the way, and sitting dow
n beside him on the bed.
He made a small grunting sound of content as I moved his head into my lap and began to stroke it, rubbing his temples, smoothing back the thick wavy mass of his hair. The back of his neck was damp; I lifted the hair away and blew softly on it, seeing the smooth fair skin prickle into gooseflesh at the nape of his neck.
“Oh, that feels good,” he murmured. Despite my resolve not to touch him beyond the demands of caretaking until everything between us was resolved, I found my hands molding themselves to the clean, bold lines of his neck and shoulders, seeking the hard knobs of his vertebrae and the broad, flat planes of his shoulder blades.
He was firm and solid under my hands, his breath a warm caress on my thigh, and it was with some reluctance that I at last eased him back onto the pillow and reached for the ampule of penicillin.
“All right,” I said, turning back the sheet and reaching for the hem of his shirt. “A quick stick, and you’ll—” My hand brushed over the front of his nightshirt, and I broke off, startled.
“Jamie!” I said, amused. “You can’t possibly!”
“I dinna suppose I can,” he agreed comfortably. He curled up on his side like a shrimp, his lashes dark against his cheek. “But a man can dream, no?”
* * *
I didn’t go upstairs to bed that night, either. We didn’t talk much, just lay close together in the narrow bed, scarcely moving, so as not to jar his injured arm. The rest of the house was quiet, everyone safely in bed, and there was no sound but the hissing of the fire, the sigh of the wind, and the scratch of Ellen’s rosebush at the window, insistent as the demands of love.
“Do ye know?” he said softly, somewhere in the black, small hours of the night. “Do ye know what it’s like to be with someone that way? To try all ye can, and seem never to have the secret of them?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of Frank. “Yes, I do know.”
“I thought perhaps ye did.” He was quiet for a moment, and then his hand touched my hair lightly, a shadowy blur in the firelight.
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