“Or, of course, it might be a wee sister, I suppose,” Mrs. Bug admitted. “But good news, good news, either way. Here, a luaidh, have a sweetie on the strength of it, and the rest of us will drink to it!”
Brianna is furious.
“Sit down, darling,” I said, in the tentative manner of one addressing a large explosive device. “You…um…had some news, you said?”
“Never mind!” She stood still, glaring. “Nobody cares, since I’m not pregnant. After all, what else could I possibly do that anybody would think was worthwhile?” She shoved a violent hand through her hair, and encountering the ribbon tying it back, yanked this loose and flung it on the ground.
“Now, sweetheart…” Roger began. I could have told him this was a mistake; Frasers in a fury tended to pay no attention to honeyed words, being instead inclined to go for the throat of the nearest party unwary enough to speak to them.
“Don’t you ‘sweetheart’ me!” she snapped, turning on him. “You think so, too! You think everything I do is a waste of time if it isn’t washing clothes or cooking dinner or mending your effing socks! And you blame me for not getting pregnant, too; you think it’s my fault! Well, it’s NOT, and you know it!”
“No! I don’t think that, I don’t at all. Brianna, please…” He stretched out a hand to her, then thought better of the gesture and withdrew it, clearly feeling that she might take his hand off at the wrist.
Roger carries Bree out bodily, and the Frasers’ subsequent discussion is interrupted by a knock on the door, which proves to be Thomas Christie, a bloodstained cloth wrapped round one hand.
Claire stitches up the gash, becoming aware as she does so of the oddly tense relations between Jamie and Tom, with small barbed comments from the latter. Claire notices that he has Dupuytren’s contracture, a progressive clawing of the fingers on one hand, and urges him to let her operate on it. Jamie makes a number of small barbed comments in return, goading Christie with references to Jamie’s own history of wounds, with the implication that it would be cowardly of Christie to avoid the surgery for fear of pain. This is too much for Christie, who agrees abruptly but gets in his own Parthian shot:
At the door, he paused, fumbling for the knob. Finding it, he drew himself up and turned back, looking for Jamie.
“At least,” he said, breathing so hard that he stumbled over the words, “at least it will be an honorable scar. Won’t it, Mac Dubh?”
Jamie straightened up abruptly, but Christie was already out, stamping down the corridor with a step heavy enough to rattle the pewter plates on the kitchen shelf.
“Why, ye wee pissant!” he said, in a tone somewhere between anger and astonishment. His left hand clenched involuntarily into a fist, and I thought it a good thing that Christie had made such a rapid exit.
This, Jamie explains, was a reference to the scars of flogging on his back; Christie had, of course, seen them at Ardsmuir. Claire inquires as to just why Jamie wants Tom Christie as a tenant, given their evident animosity.
“You aren’t afraid of Tom Christie, are you?” I demanded.
He blinked, astonished, then laughed.
“Christ, no. What makes ye think that, Sassenach?”
“Well…the way the two of you act sometimes. It’s like wild sheep, butting heads to see who’s stronger.”
“Oh, that.” He waved a hand, dismissive. “I’ve a harder head by far than Tom, and he kens it well enough. But he’s no going to give in and follow me round like a yearling lamb, either.”
“Oh? But what do you think you’re doing, then? You weren’t just torturing him to prove you could, were you?”
“No,” he said, and smiled faintly at me. “A man stubborn enough to speak English to Hieland men in prison for eight years is a man stubborn enough to fight beside me for the next eight years; that’s what I think. It would be good if he were sure of it, himself, though.”
I drew a deep breath and sighed, shaking my head.
“I do not understand men.”
That made him chuckle, deep in his chest.
“Yes, ye do, Sassenach. Ye only wish ye didn’t.”
MEANWHILE, ROGER AND Bree have made up their differences.
Roger moved a little, and groaned.
“I think ye broke my leg.”
“Did not,” said his wife, calmer now, but still disposed to argument. “But I’ll kiss it for you, if you want.”
“That’d be nice.”
Tremendous rustlings of the corn-shuck mattress ensued as she clambered into position to execute this treatment, ending with a naked Brianna straddling his chest, and leaving him with a view that caused him to wish they’d taken time to light the candle.
She was in fact kissing his shins, which tickled. Given the circumstances, though, he was inclined to put up with it. He reached up with both hands. Lacking light, Braille would do.
TOM CHRISTIE SENDS his daughter, Malva, for the ointment for his hand, and Malva shows great interest in Claire’s surgery, her instruments and materials. She examines Dr. Rawlings’s casebook with fascination.
She dimpled at me suddenly, gray eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell him I’ve had a keek at your black book, and it’s no by way of being spells in it, at all, but only receipts for teas and purges. I’ll maybe not say about the drawings, though,” she added.
“Spells?” I asked incredulously. “Is that what he thought?”
“Oh, aye,” she assured me. “He warned me not to touch it, for fear of ensorcellment.”
“Ensorcellment,” I murmured, bemused. Well, Thomas Christie was a schoolmaster, after all. In fact, he might have been right, I thought; Malva glanced back at the book as I went with her to the door, obvious fascination on her face.
CLAIRE SUCCEEDS in making ether. She wants to use it on Tom Christie but is cautious—both about the ether and about Tom. Visiting the Bugs’ homestead, she overhears Jamie talking to Arch Bug about Christie—who had come to ask Arch whether it hurt a great deal when he lost the first two fingers of his right hand. She hears the story of just how he did lose his fingers—cut off by the Frasers of Glenhelm when they caught him, as a young man, trespassing on their lands.
When Claire goes to take the stitches out of Tom Christie’s hand, he announces that he’s changed his mind; he thinks the contracture of his right hand is God’s will, and it would be wrong to seek to change it.
I suppressed the strong urge to say “Stuff and nonsense!” but with great difficulty.
“Sit down,” I said, taking a deep breath. “And tell me, if you would, just why you think God wants you to go about with a twisted hand?”
He did glance at me then, surprised and flustered.
“Why…it is not my place to question the Lord’s ways!”
“Oh, isn’t it?” I said mildly. “I rather thought that’s what you were doing last Sunday. Or wasn’t it you I heard, inquiring as to what the Lord thought He was about, letting all these Catholics flourish like the green bay tree?”
The dull red color darkened substantially.
There is a rather spirited discussion of religion, God’s will, and the nature of St. Paul’s opinions on women, ending with Claire accusing Christie of cowardice.
“The truth of it is,” I said severely, pointing a finger at him, “you’re afraid.”
“I am not!”
“Yes, you are.” I got to my feet, replaced the workbasket on the table, and shoved the rag delicately over the puddle of milk with my foot. “You’re afraid that I’ll hurt you—but I won’t,” I assured him. “I have a medicine called ether; it will make you go to sleep, and you won’t feel anything.”
He blinked at that.
“And perhaps you’re afraid that you’ll lose a few fingers, or what use of your hand you have.”
He was still kneeling on the hearth, staring up at me.
“I can’t absolutely guarantee that you won’t,” I said. “I don’t think that will happen—but man proposes, and God disposes, doesn’t He?�
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He reluctantly capitulates.
“All right,” he said at last, hoarsely. He pulled his hand away from mine, not abruptly, but almost with reluctance, and stood cradling it in his sound one. “When?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, “if the weather is good. I’ll need good light,” I explained, seeing the startled look in his eyes. “Come in the morning, but don’t eat breakfast.”
Claire wonders to Jamie the next day whether Tom will really come—but he does. Only to announce that he has changed his mind again, though—he will not allow her to use her foul potion (ether) on him. He will, however, let her mend his hand.
Jamie settles the impasse, lending Tom his support, his whisky, and his small Bible, holding his attention to various bits of Scripture while Claire works.
Jamie still held the bound arm tight, but had his other hand on Christie’s shoulder, his own head bent near Christie’s; his eyes, too, were closed, as he whispered the words.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…”
I knotted the last suture, clipped the thread, and in the same movement, cut through the linen bindings with my scissors, and let go the breath I’d been holding. The men’s voices stopped abruptly.
I lifted the hand, wrapped a fresh dressing tightly around it, and pressed the clawed fingers gently back, straightening them.
Christie’s eyes opened, slowly. His pupils were huge and dark behind his lenses, as he blinked at his hand. I smiled at him, and patted it.
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” I said softly. “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Claire insists that Christie stay at the Big House overnight and goes up before bed to check the state of his wound; he criticizes her hair.
“Your hair.” I looked up to see him staring at me, mouth curved downward in disapproval. “It’s…” He made a vague movement round his own clipped poll. “It’s…”
I raised my brows at him.
“There’s a great deal of it,” he ended, rather feebly.
She gives him wine, and a little the worse for drink, he reveals his envy of Jamie’s courage, even as he disparages him as a Catholic and a barbarian.
My personal barbarian was asleep, but woke, catlike, when I crawled into bed. He stretched out an arm and gathered me into himself with a sleepily interrogative “mmmm?”
I nestled against him, tight muscles beginning to relax automatically into his warmth.
“Mmmm.”
“Ah. And how’s our wee Tom, then?” He leaned back a little and his big hands came down on my trapezius, kneading the knots from my neck and shoulders.
“Oh. Oh. Obnoxious, prickly, censorious, and very drunk. Otherwise, fine.”
They discuss Alex MacGregor’s Bible—the small book belonging to a dead prisoner from Ardsmuir. Claire wakes from sleep a little later to find Jamie waking from a dream of Ardsmuir.
“In the dark…” he whispered at last, “there at Ardsmuir, we lay in the dark. Sometimes there was a moon, or starlight, but even then, ye couldna see anything on the floor where we lay. It was naught but black—but ye could hear.”
Hear the breathing of the forty men in the cell, and the shuffles and shifts of their movement. Snores, coughing, the sounds of restless sleep—and the small furtive sounds from those who lay awake.
“It would be weeks, and we wouldna think of it.” His voice was coming easier now. “We were always starved, cold. Worn to the bone. Ye dinna think much, then; only of how to put one foot in front of another, lift another stone…ye dinna really want to think, ken? And it’s easy enough not to. For a time.”
…“Did any of them ever…touch you?” I asked tentatively.
“No. None of them would ever think to touch me,” he said very softly. “I was their chief. They loved me—but they wouldna think, ever, to touch me.”
He took a deep, ragged breath.
“And did you want them to?” I whispered. I could feel my own pulse begin to throb in my fingertips, against his skin.
“I hungered for it,” he said, so softly I could barely hear him, close as I was. “More than food. More than sleep—though I wished most desperately for sleep, and not only for the sake of tiredness. For when I slept, sometimes I saw ye.
“But it wasna the longing for a woman—though Christ knows, that was bad enough. It was only—I wanted the touch of a hand. Only that.”
His skin had ached with need, ’til he felt it must grow transparent, and the raw soreness of his heart be seen in his chest.
He made a small rueful sound, not quite a laugh.
“Ye ken those pictures of the Sacred Heart—the same as we saw in Paris?”
I knew them—Renaissance paintings, the vividness of stained glass glowing in the aisles of Notre Dame. The Man of Sorrows, his heart exposed and pierced, radiant with love.
“I remembered that. And I thought to myself that whoever saw that vision of Our Lord was likely a verra lonely man himself, to have understood so well.”
I lifted my hand and laid it on the small hollow in the center of his chest, very lightly. The sheet was thrown back, and his skin was cool.
He closed his eyes, sighing, and clasped my hand, hard.
“The thought of that would come to me sometimes, and I would think I kent what Jesus must feel like there—so wanting, and no one to touch Him.”
JAMIE AND ROGER head for the Cherokee villages, Jamie intending to introduce Roger, as he may need to know the Indians. Roger tells Jamie that Hiram Crombie has decided he must go and preach to the Cherokee, which Jamie considers funny, though seeing the potential for complications. The conversation is interrupted, though, by the smell of burning.
They find a homestead, freshly burned, two bodies hanging from a tree outside, with a notice accusing them of being Regulators. But Jamie is more concerned with what’s not there—the children who belong to the homestead. They call through the woods, but the children are gone. Almost.
Roger thought it was a rock at first, half-hidden in the leaves that had drifted against the scorched cabin wall. He touched it, and it moved, bringing him to his feet with a cry that would have done credit to any of the corbies.
Jamie reached him in seconds, in time to help dig the little girl out of the leaves and cinders.
“Hush, a muirninn, hush,” Jamie said urgently, though in fact the child was not crying. She was maybe eight, her clothes and hair burned away and her skin so blackened and cracked that she might have been made of stone indeed, save for her eyes.
“Oh, God, oh, God.” Roger kept saying it, under his breath, long after it became clear that if it was a prayer, it was long past answering.
The child is burned beyond help; they cannot even take her to Claire.
Then they looked at each other, acknowledging necessity. Jamie was pale, sweat beading on his upper lip among the bristles of red beard. He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and lifted his hands, offering.
“No,” Roger said softly. “I’ll do it.” She was his; he could no more surrender her to another than he could have torn off an arm. He reached for the handkerchief, and Jamie put it into his hand, soot-stained, still damp.
He’d never thought of such a thing, and couldn’t think now. He didn’t need to; without hesitation, he cradled her close and put the handkerchief over her nose and mouth, then clamped his hand tight over the cloth, feeling the small bump of her nose caught snug between his thumb and index finger.
Wind stirred in the leaves above, and a rain of gold fell on them, whispering on his skin, brushing cool past his face. She would be cold, he thought, and wished to cover her, but had no hand to spare.
His other arm was round her, hand resting on her chest; he could feel the tiny heart beneath his fingers. It jumped, beat rapidly, skipped, beat twice more…and stopped. It quivered for a moment; he could feel it trying to find enough strength to beat one last time, and suffer
ed the momentary illusion that it would not only do so, but would force its way through the fragile wall of her chest and into his hand in its urge to live.
But the moment passed, as did the illusion, and a great stillness came. Near at hand, a raven called.
They bury the child but are interrupted by the arrival of Richard and Lionel Brown with some of their men. There is a not-quite confrontation between the Browns and Jamie, but the Browns back down and ride away.
PART 4: ABDUCTION
Roger returns, anxious about his family but glad to be home and have them safe. He relaxes, listening to Brianna’s explanations of her plans: she’s dug a kiln to fire pottery, with the intent of making clay pipe segments to carry warm air to make a hypocaust, and to carry water to the house.
DISTURBED BY HEARING that Marsali has bruises on her arm, Claire heads up the trail to the malting shed, where Marsali is working, intending to have a private conversation.
What ought I to say? I wondered. A straightforward “Is Fergus beating you?” I couldn’t quite believe that, despite—or perhaps because of—an intimate knowledge of emergency rooms filled with the debris of domestic disputes.
It wasn’t that I thought Fergus incapable of violence; he’d seen—and experienced—any amount of it from an early age, and growing up among Highlanders in the middle of the Rising and its aftermath probably did not inculcate a young man with any deep regard for the virtues of peace. On the other hand, Jenny Murray had had a hand in his upbringing.
I tried and failed to imagine any man who had lived with Jamie’s sister for more than a week ever lifting his hand to a woman. Besides, I knew by my own observations that Fergus was a very gentle father, and there was usually an easiness between him and Marsali that seemed—
She is surprised by Germain, who drops out of a tree along her path and accompanies her to the malting floor, where Marsali sends him home. Claire interrogates her about Fergus; Marsali heatedly denies that he has been abusing her and tells Claire that it was a mistake, that Fergus grabbed her wrist when she tried to brain him with a stick of wood. She goes on to tell Claire about her mother, Laoghaire, and Laoghaire’s husband, who was violent toward her. Claire offers to shovel the heavy grain, to let Marsali rest, as she’s very pregnant.
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 9
