Jamie shook his head.
“I suppose they canna miss what they’ve never had,” he said. “And they’ve had food, after all.” He leaned on the fence for a few moments, watching the curly tails begin to wag and twirl with pleasure, the tiny wounds beneath apparently forgotten.
“Besides,” he added cynically, “a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy—though I havena met many who’d wish them gone, for all that.”
“Well, priests might find them a burden, I suppose.” I pulled the stained shirt gingerly away from my body before lifting it over my head. “Phew. Nothing smells worse than pig excrement—nothing.”
“What—not a blackbirder’s hold, or a rotting corpse?” he asked, laughing. “Festering wounds? A billy goat?”
“Pig shit,” I said firmly. “Hands down.”
Jamie took the wadded shirt from me and ripped it into strips, reserving the cleanest ones for jobs like wiping tools and wedging cracks. The rest he consigned to the fire, stepping back as a random breeze blew a plume of reeking smoke in our direction.
“Aye, well, there was Narses. He was a great general, or so they say, in spite of being a eunuch.”
“Perhaps a man’s mind works better without the distraction,” I suggested, laughing.
He gave no more than a brief snort in reply to this, though it was tinged with amusement. He shoveled dirt onto the cinders of the fire, while I retrieved my cautery iron and tar-pot, and we went back to the house, talking of other things.
My mind lingered on that one remark, though—“a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy.” Had he been speaking only generally? I wondered. Or had there been some personal allusion lurking in it?
In everything he had ever said to me regarding his brief marriage to Laoghaire MacKenzie—little as that was, by our common consent—there had been no hint that he had felt physically drawn to her. He had wed her from loneliness and a sense of duty, wanting some small anchor in the emptiness his life had been after his return from England. Or so he had said.
And I believed what he’d said. He was a man of honor and duty, and I knew what his loneliness had been—for I had had my own. On the other hand, I knew his body, nearly as well as my own. If it had a great capacity to endure hardship, it had an equal capacity to experience great joy. Jamie could be ascetic from necessity—never from natural temperament.
Most of the time I succeeded in forgetting that he had shared Laoghaire’s bed, however briefly and—he said—unsatisfactorily. I did not forget that she had been, and was still, quite an attractive woman.
Which left me rather wishing that Jenny Murray had found some other inspiration for the conversion of her feelings toward her brother.
Jamie was quiet and abstracted through the rest of the day, though he roused himself to be sociable when Fergus and Marsali arrived with their children for a visit after supper. He taught Germain to play draughts, while Fergus recalled for Roger the words of a ballad he had picked up in the alleys of Paris as a juvenile pickpocket. The women retired to the hearth to stitch baby gowns, knit booties, and—in honor of Marsali’s advancing pregnancy and Lizzie’s engagement—entertain each other with hair-raising anecdotes of labor and birth.
“Laid sideways, the babe was, and the size of a six-month shoat …”
“Ha, Germain had a head like a cannonball, the midwife said, and he was facing backward, the wee rattan—”
“Jemmy had a huge head, but it was his shoulders that were the problem.…”
“… le bourse … the lady’s ‘purse,’ of course, is her—”
“Her means of making a living, aye, I see. Then the next bit, where her customer puts his fingers in her purse—”
“No, ye dinna get to move yet, it’s still my turn, for I’ve jumped your man there, and so I can go here—”
“Merde!”
“Germain!” Marsali bellowed. She glared at her offspring, who hunched his shoulders, scowling at the draughtboard, lower lip thrust out.
“Dinna fash yourself, man, for see? Now it’s your turn, ye can go there, and there, and there—”
“… Avez-vous ête a la selle aujourd’hui?… and what he is asking the whore, of course—”
“ ‘Have you—been in the saddle today?’ Or would it be, ‘Have you had a ride today?’ ”
Fergus laughed, the end of his aristocratic nose pinkening with amusement.
“Well, that is one translation, surely.”
Roger lifted a brow at him, half-smiling.
“Aye?”
“That particular expression is also what a French doctor says,” I put in, seeing his incomprehension. “Colloquially speaking, it means, ‘Have you had a bowel movement today?’ ”
“The lady in question being perhaps une specialiste,” Fergus explained cheerfully. “I used to know one who—”
“Fergus!” Marsali’s whole face was pink, though she seemed more amused than outraged.
“I see,” Roger murmured, eyebrows still raised as he struggled with the nuances of this bit of sophisticated translation. I did wonder how one would set it to music.
“Comment sont vos selles, grandpere?” Germain inquired chummily, evidently familiar with this line of social inquiry. And how are your stools, grandfather?
“Free and easy,” his grandfather assured him. “Eat up your parritch every morning, and ye’ll never have piles.”
“Da!”
“Well, it’s true,” Jamie protested.
Brianna was bright red, and emitting small fizzing noises. Jemmy stirred in her lap.
“Le petit rouge eats parritch,” Germain observed, frowning narrowly at Jemmy, who was nursing contentedly at his mother’s breast, eyes closed. “He shits stones.”
“Germain!” all the women shouted in unison.
“Well, it’s true,” he said, in perfect imitation of his grandfather. Looking dignified, he turned his back on the women and began building towers with the draughts-men.
“He doesna seem to want to give up the teat,” Marsali observed, nodding at Jemmy. “Neither did Germain, but he’d no choice—nor did poor wee Joanie.” She glanced ruefully down at her stomach, which was barely beginning to swell with Number Three.
I caught the barest flicker of a glance between Roger and Bree, followed by a Mona Lisa smile on Brianna’s face. She settled herself more comfortably, and stroked Jemmy’s head. Enjoy it while you can, sweetheart, her actions said, more vividly than words.
I felt my own eyebrows rise, and glanced toward Jamie. He’d seen that little byplay, too, and gave me the male equivalent of Brianna’s smile, before turning back to the draughtsboard.
“I like parritch,” Lizzie put in shyly, in a minor attempt to change the subject. “Specially with honey and milk.”
“Ah,” said Fergus, reminded of his original task. He turned back to Roger, lifting a finger. “Honeypots. The refrain, you see, where les abeilles come buzzing—”
“Aye, aye, that’s so,” Mrs. Bug neatly recaptured the conversation, when he paused to draw breath, “parritch wi’ honey is the best thing for the bowels, though sometimes even that fails. Why, I kent a man once, who couldna move his bowels for more than a month!”
“Indeed. Did he try a pellet of wax rolled in goose-grease? Or a tisane of grape leaves?” Fergus was instantly diverted. French to the core, he was a great connoisseur of purges, laxatives, and suppositories.
“Everything,” Mrs. Bug assured him. “Parritch, dried apples, wine mixed wi’ an ox’s gall, water drunk at the dark o’ the moon at midnight … nothing at all would shift him. ’Twas the talk of the village, wi’ folk placing wagers, and the poor man gone quite gray in the face. Nervous spasms, it was, and his bowels tied up like garter strings, so that—”
“Did he explode?” Germain asked, interested.
Mrs. Bug shook briefly with laughter.
“No, that he didna, laddie. Though I did hear as how it was a near thing.”
�
��What was it finally shifted him, then?” Jamie asked.
“She finally said she’d marry me, and not the other fellow.” Mr. Bug, who had been dozing in the corner of the settle through the evening, stood up and stretched himself, then put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, smiling tenderly down at her upturned face. “ ’Twas a great relief, to be sure.”
It was late when we went to bed, after a convivial evening that ended with Fergus singing the prostitute’s ballad in its lengthy entirety to general applause, Jamie and German beating time on the table with their hands.
Jamie lay back against the pillow, hands crossed behind his head, chuckling to himself now and then as bits of the song came back to him. It was cold enough that the windowpanes were misted with our breath, but he wore no nightshirt, and I admired the sight of him as I sat brushing my hair.
He had recovered well from the snakebite, but was still thinner than usual, so that the graceful arch of his collarbone was visible, and the long muscles of his arms roped from bone to bone, distinct beneath his skin. The skin of his chest was bronze where his shirt usually lay open, but the tender skin on the underside of his arms was white as milk, a tracery of blue veins showing. The light shadowed the prominent bones of his face and glimmered from his hair, cinnamon and amber where it lay across his shoulders, dark auburn and red-gold where it dusted his bared body.
“The candlelight becomes ye, Sassenach,” he said, smiling, and I saw that he was watching me, blue eyes the color of bottomless ocean.
“I was just thinking the same of you,” I said, standing up and putting aside my brush. My hair floated in a cloud round my shoulders, clean, soft, and shining. It smelled of marigolds and sunflowers and so did my skin. Bathing and shampooing in winter was a major undertaking, but I had been determined not to go to bed smelling of pig shit.
“Let it burn, then,” he said, reaching out to stop me as I bent to blow the candle out. His hand curled round my wrist, urging me toward him.
“Come to bed, and let me watch ye. I like the way the light moves in your eyes; like whisky, when ye pour it on a haggis, and then set it on fire.”
“How poetic,” I murmured, but made no demur as he made room for me, pulled loose the drawstring of my shift, and slipped it off me. The air of the room was cold enough to make my nipples draw up tight, but the skin of his chest was delightfully warm on my breasts as he gathered me into him, sighing with pleasure.
“It’s Fergus’s song inspiring me, I expect,” he said, cupping one of my breasts in his hand and weighing it with a nice balance between admiration and appraisal. “God, ye’ve the loveliest breasts. Ye recall that one verse, where he says the lady’s tits were so enormous, she could wrap them round his ears? Yours aren’t so big as that, of course, but d’ye think ye maybe could wrap them round—”
“I don’t think they need to be enormous to do that,” I assured him. “Move up. Besides, I don’t believe it’s actually wrapping round, so much as it is squashing together, and they’re certainly large enough for … see?”
“Oh,” he said, sounding deeply gratified and a little breathless. “Aye, ye’re right. That’s … oh, that looks verra beautiful, Sassenach—at least from here.”
“It looks very interesting from here, too,” I assured him, trying neither to laugh nor go cross-eyed. “Which one of us moves, do you think?”
“Me, for now. I’m no chafing ye, Sassenach?” he inquired.
“Well, just a bit. Wait, though—” I reached out a hand, feeling blindly over the table by the bed. I got hold of the little pot of creamy almond ointment I used for hand lotion, flicked the lid off, and dug a finger into it.
“Yes, that’s much better,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Oh. Oh. Aye.”
“And then there’s that other verse, isn’t there?” I said thoughtfully, letting go for a moment, and drawing a slippery finger slowly round the curve of his buttock. “About what the prostitute did to the choirboy?”
“Oh, Christ!”
“Yes, that’s what he said. According to the song.”
Much later, in the dark, I roused from sleep to feel his hands on me again. Still pleasantly adrift in dreams, I didn’t move, but lay inert, letting him do what he would.
My mind was loosely tethered to reality, and it took some time for me to come to the slow realization that something wasn’t quite right. It took even longer to focus my mind and struggle toward the surface of wakefulness, but at last I got my eyes open, blinking away clouds of sleep.
He was crouched half over me, his face half-lit by the dim glow from the smoored hearth. His eyes were closed, and he was frowning a little, his breath coming through half-opened lips. He moved almost mechanically, and I wondered, muzzily astonished, whether he could possibly be doing it in his sleep?
A thin film of sweat gleamed on the high cheekbones, the long straight bridge of his nose, on the slopes and curves of his naked body.
He was stroking me in an odd, monotonous sort of way, like a man working at some repetitive task. The touch was more than intimate, but weirdly impersonal; I might have been anybody—or anything—I thought.
Then he moved, and eyes still closed, flipped back the quilt covering me and moved between my legs, spreading them apart in a brusque fashion that was quite unlike him. His brows were drawn together, knotted in a frown of concentration. I moved instinctively to close my legs, squirming away. His hands clamped down on my shoulders then, his knee thrust my thighs apart, and he entered me roughly.
I made a high-pitched sound of startled protest, and his eyes popped open. He stared at me, his eyes no more than an inch from mine, unfocused, then sharpening into abrupt awareness. He froze.
“Who the bloody hell do you think I am?” I said, low-voiced and furious.
He wrenched himself away and flung himself off the bed, leaving the covers hanging to the floor in disarray. He seized his clothes from the peg, reached the door in two strides, opened it, and disappeared, slamming it behind him.
I sat up, feeling thoroughly rattled. I scrabbled the quilts back up around myself, feeling dazed, angry—and halfway disbelieving. I rubbed my hands over my face, trying to wake up all the way. Surely I hadn’t been dreaming?
No. He was. He’d been half-asleep—or wholly so—and he’d bloody thought I was bloody Laoghaire! Nothing else could account for the way he had been touching me, with a sense of painful impatience tinged with anger; he had never touched me like that in his life.
I lay back down, but it was patently impossible to go back to sleep. I stared at the shadowy rafters for a few minutes, then rose with decision, and got dressed.
The dooryard was bleak and cold under a high, bright moon. I stepped out, closing the kitchen door softly behind me, and clutched my cloak round me, listening. Nothing stirred in the cold, and the wind was no more than a sigh through the pines. At some distance, though, I heard a faint, regular noise, and turned toward it, making my way carefully through the dark.
The door of the haybarn was open.
I leaned against the doorjamb, and crossed my arms, watching as he stamped to and fro, pitching hay in the moonlight, working off his temper. Mine was still pulsing in my temples, but began to subside as I watched him.
The difficulty was that I did understand, and all too well. I had not met many of Frank’s women—he was discreet. But now and then, I would catch a glance exchanged at a faculty party or the local supermarket—and a feeling of black rage would well up in me, only to be followed by bafflement as to what, precisely, I was to do with it.
Jealousy had nothing to do with logic.
Laoghaire MacKenzie was four thousand miles away; likely neither of us would ever see her again. Frank was even farther away, and it was certain neither of us would ever see him again, this side the grave.
No, jealousy had nothing at all to do with logic.
I began to be cold, but went on standing there. He knew I was there; I could see it in the way he kept his head turn
ed toward his work. He was sweating, in spite of the cold; the thin cloth of his shirt stuck to him, making a dark spot on his back. At last, he stabbed the pitchfork into the stack, left it, and sat down on a bench made from half a log. He put his head in his hands, fingers rubbing violently through his hair.
Finally, he looked up at me, with an expression halfway between dismay and reluctant amusement.
“I dinna understand it.”
“What?” I moved toward him, and sat down near him, curling my feet under me. I could smell the sweat on his skin, along with almond cream and the ghost of his earlier lust.
He gave me a sidelong glance, and answered dryly, “Anything, Sassenach.”
“Can’t be that bad, can it?” I reached tentatively for him, and ran a hand lightly down the curve of his back.
He heaved a deep sigh, blowing air through pursed lips.
“When I was three-and-twenty, I didna understand how it was that to look at a woman could turn my bones to water, yet make me feel I could bend steel in my hands. When I was five-and-twenty, I didna understand how I could want both to cherish a woman and ravish her, all at once.”
“A woman?” I asked, and got what I wanted—the curl of his mouth and a glance that went through my heart.
“One woman,” he said. He took the hand I laid on his knee, and held it tightly, as though afraid I might snatch it back. “Just one,” he repeated, his voice husky.
It was quiet in the barn, but the boards creaked and settled in the cold. I moved a little on the bench, scooting toward him. Just a little. Moonlight streamed through the wide-open door, glowing dimly off the piled hay.
“And that,” he said, squeezing my fingers tighter, “is what I dinna ken now. I love you, a nighean donn. I have loved ye from the moment I saw ye, I will love ye ’til time itself is done, and so long as you are by my side, I am well pleased wi’ the world.”
A flush of warmth went through me, but before I could do more than squeeze his hand in reply, he went on, turning to look at me with an expression of bewilderment so desperate as to be almost comical.
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