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

by Diana Gabaldon

  I dug slowly and peaceably, lifting the dripping roots into my basket and packing each layer between mats of watercress. Sweat was running down my face and between my breasts, but I didn’t notice it; I was melting quietly into the landscape, breath and muscle turning to wind and earth and water.

  Cicadas buzzed heavily in the trees nearby, and gnats and mosquitoes were beginning to collect in uneasy clouds overhead. These were luckily only a nuisance when they flew up my nose or hovered too close to my face; apparently my twentieth-century blood wasn’t attractive to eighteenth-century insects, and I was almost never bitten—a great blessing to a gardener. Lulled into mindlessness, I had quite lost track of time and place, and when a pair of large, battered shoes appeared in my field of view, I merely blinked at them for a moment, as I might at the sudden appearance of a frog.

  Then I looked up.

  What she sees, of course, is Jamie. And what ensues, of course, is a rather fraught conversation:

  “Ye went to bed with John Grey, aye?”

  I blinked, startled, then frowned at him. “Well, no, I wouldn’t say that.”

  His eyebrows rose.

  “He told me ye did.”

  “Is that what he said?” I asked, surprised.

  “Mmphm.” Now it was his turn to frown. “He told me he’d had carnal knowledge of ye. Why would he lie about such a thing as that?”

  “Oh,” I said. “No, that’s right. Carnal knowledge is a very reasonable description of what happened.”

  “But—”

  “ ‘Going to bed,’ though…For one thing, we didn’t. It started on a dressing table and ended—so far as I recall—on the floor.” Jamie’s eyes widened noticeably, and I hastened to correct the impression he was obviously forming. “For another, that phraseology implies that we decided to make love to each other and toddled off hand in hand to do so, and that wasn’t what happened at all. Umm…perhaps we should sit down?” I gestured toward a rustic bench, standing knee-deep in creamy drifts of ranunculus.

  I hadn’t had a single thought of that night since learning Jamie was alive, but it was beginning to dawn on me that it might quite possibly seem important to Jamie—and that explaining what had happened might be somewhat tricky.

  The succeeding conversation is indeed tricky, with a fair amount of justified high feeling on both sides.

  “He did say there was drink taken,” Jamie observed.

  “Lots. He seemed nearly as drunk as I was, save that he was still on his feet.” I could see John’s face in memory, white as bone save for his eyes, which were so red and swollen that they might have been sandpapered. And the expression in those eyes. “He looked the way a man looks just before he throws himself off a cliff,” I said quietly, eyes on my folded hands. I took another breath.

  “He had a fresh decanter in his hand. He put it down on the dressing table beside me, glared at me, and said, ‘I will not mourn him alone tonight.’” A deep quiver ran through me at the memory of those words.

  “And…?”

  “And he didn’t,” I said, a little sharply. “I told him to sit down and he did, and he poured out more brandy and we drank it, and I have not one single notion what we said, but we were talking about you. And then he stood up, and I stood up. And…I couldn’t bear to be alone and I couldn’t bear for him to be alone and I more or less flung myself at him because I very much needed someone to touch me just then.”

  “And he obliged ye, I take it.”

  The tone of this was distinctly cynical, and I felt a flush rise in my cheeks, not of embarrassment but of anger.

  “Did he bugger you?”

  I looked at him for a good long minute. He meant it.

  “You absolute bastard,” I said, as much in astonishment as anger. Then a thought occurred to me. “You said he desired you to kill him,” I said slowly. “You…didn’t, did you?”

  He held my eyes, his own steady as a rifle barrel.

  “Would ye mind if I did?” he asked softly.

  But Claire does at last find words to describe what it was that happened between her and Lord John:

  “Triage,” I said abruptly. “Under the numbness, I was…raw. Bloody. Skinned. You do triage, you…stop the bleeding first. You stop it. You stop it, or the patient dies. He stopped it.”

  He’d stopped it by slapping his own grief, his own fury, over the welling blood of mine. Two wounds, pressed together, blood still flowing freely—but no longer lost and draining, flowing instead into another body, and the other’s blood into mine, hot, searing, not welcome—but life.

  Jamie said something under his breath in Gaelic. I didn’t catch most of the words. He sat with his head bent, elbows on his knees and head in his hands, and breathed audibly.

  After a moment, I sat back down beside him and breathed, too. The cicadas grew louder, an urgent buzz that drowned out the rush of water and the rustling of leaves, humming in my bones.

  “Damn him,” Jamie muttered at last, and sat up. He looked disturbed, angry—but not angry at me.

  “John, um, is all right, isn’t he?” I asked hesitantly. To my surprise—and my slight unease—Jamie’s lips twisted a little.

  “Aye. Well. I’m sure he is,” he said, in a tone admitting of a certain doubt, which I found alarming.

  “What the bloody hell did you do to him?” I said, sitting up straight.

  His lips compressed for an instant.

  “I hit him,” he said. “Twice,” he added, glancing away.

  “Twice?” I echoed, in some shock. “Did he fight you?”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “Really.” I rocked back a bit, looking him over. Now that I had calmed down enough to take notice, I thought he was displaying…what? Concern? Guilt?

  “Why did you hit him?” I asked, striving for a tone of mild curiosity, rather than one of accusation. Evidently I was less than successful with this, as he turned on me like a bear stung in the rump by a bee.

  “Why? Ye dare to ask me why?”

  “Certainly I do,” I said, discarding the mild tone. “What did he do to make you hit him? And twice?” Jamie had no problem with mayhem, but he normally did require a reason.

  He made a deeply disgruntled Scottish noise, but he’d promised me honesty a long time ago and hadn’t seen fit to break that promise yet. He squared his shoulders and looked at me straight.

  “The first was between him and me; it was a blow I’ve owed him for a good while.”

  “And you just seized the opportunity to punch him, because it was convenient?” I asked, a bit wary of asking directly what the devil he meant by “between him and me.”

  “I couldna help it,” he said testily. “He said something and I hit him.”

  I didn’t say anything but inhaled through my nose, meaning him to hear it. There was a long moment of silence, weighted with expectation and broken only by the shush of the river.

  “He said the two of ye hadna been making love to each other,” he finally muttered, looking down.

  “No, we weren’t,” I said, somewhat surprised. “I told you. We were both—oh!”

  He did look up at me then, glaring.

  “Oh,” he said, the word dripping with sarcasm. “Ye were both fucking me, he said.”

  “Oh, I see,” I murmured. “Well. Um. Yes, that’s quite true.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “I see,” I said again, and thought I probably did. There was a deep friendship of long standing between Jamie and John, but I was aware that one of the pillars it rested on was a strict avoidance of any reference to John’s sexual attraction toward Jamie. If John had lost his composure sufficiently as to kick that pillar out from under the two of them…

  “And the second time?” I asked, choosing not to ask him to elaborate any further on the first.

  “Aye, well, that one was on your account,” he said, both voice and face relaxing a little.

  “I’m flattered,” I said, as dryly as possible. “But you really shouldn’t have.”<
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  “Well, I ken that now,” he admitted, flushing. “But I’d lost my temper already and hadna got it back again. Ifrinn,” he muttered, and, stooping, picked up the discarded digging knife and jammed it hard into the bench beside him.

  Despite the difficulties of the conversation, though, the basic fact is established beyond doubt:

  “I wish to say something,” he said, in the tone of one making a formal statement before a court. My heart had quieted while he held me; now it fluttered in renewed agitation.

  “What?” I sounded so apprehensive that he laughed. Only a breath, but he did laugh, and I was able to breathe again. He took my hand firmly and held it, looking into my eyes.

  “I don’t say that I dinna mind this, because I do. And I don’t say that I’ll no make a fuss about it later, because I likely will. But what I do say is that there is nothing in this world or the next that can take ye from me—or me from you.” He raised one brow. “D’ye disagree?”

  “Oh, no,” I said fervently.

  He breathed again, and his shoulders came down a fraction of an inch.

  “Well, that’s good, because it wouldna do ye any good if ye did. Just the one question,” he said. “Are ye my wife?”

  “Of course I am,” I said, in utter astonishment. “How could I not be?”

  His face changed then; he drew a huge breath and took me into his arms. I embraced him, hard, and together we let out a great sigh, settling with it, his head bending over mine, kissing my hair, my face turned into his shoulder, openmouthed at the neck of his open shirt, our knees slowly giving way in mutual relief, so that we knelt in the fresh-turned earth, clinging together, rooted like a tree, leaf-tossed and multi-limbed but sharing one single solid trunk.

  The first drops of rain began to fall.

  Whereupon:

  His face was open now and his eyes clear blue and free of trouble—for the moment, at least. “Where is there a bed? I need to be naked with ye.”

  BACK IN THE woods outside Philadelphia, Lord John’s escape has been interrupted by another encounter with militiamen—but now attired in civilian clothes and fetters, he manages to convince them that he’s an American who has escaped from British captors.

  Well enough for the moment; his new acquaintances take him back to camp, get his fetters off, and feed him. But—

  AND AS THE sun set on the third day since he had left his home, Lord John William Bertram Amstrong Grey found himself once more a free man, with a full belly, a swimming head, a badly mended musket, and severely chafed wrists, standing before the Reverend Peleg Woodsworth, right hand uplifted, reciting as prompted:

  “I, Bertram Armstrong, swear to be true to the United States of America, and to serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies and opposers whatsoever, and to observe and obey the orders of the Continental Congress and the orders of the generals and officers set over me by them.”

  Bloody hell, he thought. What next?

  What next, indeed? Part Two, that’s what. Artfully titled…

  PART 2: MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE RANCH…

  Part Two takes up where we left Roger, Brianna, Jemmy, Mandy, and Roger’s ancestor, William Buccleigh MacKenzie (aka “Buck”).

  Roger and Buck have gone through the stone circle at Craigh na Dun, in pursuit—they think—of Rob Cameron, one of Brianna’s co-workers at the Highlands and Islands Development Board, who has kidnapped Jemmy and taken him into the past—they think—in an attempt not only to learn the secrets of time travel but also to find the gold that Jamie Fraser cached on Fraser’s Ridge, the location known only to himself and to his grandson, Jemmy.

  The passage through the stones is physically and emotionally shattering, and while Roger recovers fairly quickly, his four-times great-grandfather is not so fortunate. He’s alarmingly debilitated by the crossing, having chest pains and symptoms of heart trouble. He does manage to get up, though, and the two men agree to separate and search in different directions for any sign of Rob Cameron and Jem, then meet again near Craigh na Dun in six days’ time.

  UNBEKNOWNST TO THE rescuers, though, neither Rob Cameron nor Jemmy is in the past. Cameron has decoyed them, in hopes of getting Brianna alone, and has stashed Jem for safekeeping in a hydroelectric service tunnel under the Loch Errochty dam.

  Jem, who has visited the dam with his mother, is a little unnerved by the dark—and by thought of Mr. Cameron coming back—but he finds the small electric train that carries workers up and down the length of the tunnel and runs it slowly toward the farther end, hoping to find the service door there unlocked. As he passes through the dark, though, he’s struck suddenly by something that knocks him flat, causing him to fall out of the train and lie stunned for a few moments.

  Realizing that he isn’t dead, as he’d first assumed, and is capable of movement, he gets up and looks at what hit him—or, rather, at the thing he’d hit.

  He couldn’t see it, not with his eyes, not exactly. He squinted, trying to think how he was seeing it, but there wasn’t a word for what he was doing. Kind of like hearing or smelling or touching, but not really any of those.

  But he knew where it was. It was right there, a kind of…shiver…in the air, and when he stared at it, he had a feeling in the back of his mind like pretty sparkly things, like sun on the sea and the way a candle flame looked when it shone through a ruby, but he knew he wasn’t really seeing anything like that.

  It went all the way across the tunnel, and up to the high roof, too, he could tell. But it wasn’t thick at all; it was thin as air.

  He guessed that was why it hadn’t swallowed him like the thing in the rocks on Ocracoke had. At least…he thought it hadn’t and, for an instant, worried that maybe he’d gone sometime else. But he didn’t think so. The tunnel felt just the same, and so did he, now that his skin had stopped jumping. When they’d done it, on Ocracoke, he’d known right away it was different.

  He stood there for a minute, just looking and thinking, and then shook his head and turned around, feeling with his foot for the track. He wasn’t going back through that, no matter what. He’d just have to hope the door wasn’t locked.

  MEANWHILE, ROB CAMERON has gone to Lallybroch to confront Brianna, toward whom he’s held a grudge—and considerable lust—since she was appointed supervisor over him. He wants information, about the stones, about time travel, and about the gold—but he also wants Brianna.

  Brianna’s hand closed on the letter opener, but even as she calculated the distance involved, the obstacle of the desk between Rob Cameron and herself, and the flimsiness of the wooden blade, she was reluctantly concluding that she couldn’t kill the bastard. Not yet.

  “Where’s my son?”

  “He’s okay.”

  She stood up suddenly, and he jerked a little in reflex. His face flushed and he hardened his expression.

  “He’d bloody well better be okay,” she snapped. “I said, where is he?”

  “Oh, no, hen,” he said, rocking back on his heels, affecting nonchalance. “That’s no how we’re playing it. Not tonight.”

  God, why didn’t Roger keep a hammer or a chisel or something useful in his desk drawer? Did he expect her to staple this jerk? She braced herself, both hands flat on the desk, to keep from leaping over it and going for his throat.

  “I’m not playing,” she said through her teeth. “And neither are you. Where’s Jemmy?”

  It won’t be the first time Rob Cameron has underestimated a Fraser, but it might be the last. He tells Brianna to undress, intending to rape her. Knowing she can’t possibly overpower him in a fight, Bree takes him by surprise, lashing her jeans across his face and then smashing the wooden box in which her parents’ letters are kept over his head. He recovers and chases her down the hall, but she’s in time to reach the hall tree, where the family sports equipment is kept.

  There were weapons on the walls of the foyer, a few targes and broadswords kept for ornament, but all hung high, to be out of the children’s reach.
There was a better one easily to hand, though. She reached behind the coat rack and grabbed Jem’s cricket bat.

  You can’t kill him, she kept thinking, dimly surprised at the fact that her mind was still working. Don’t kill him. Not yet. Not ’til he says where Jemmy is.

  “Fucking…bitch!” He was nearly on her, panting, half blinded by blood running down his forehead, half sobbing through the blood pouring from his nose. “Fuck you, split you open, fuck you up the—”

  “Caisteal DOOON!” she bellowed, and, stepping out from behind the coat rack, swung the bat in a scything arc that caught him in the ribs. He made a gurgling noise and folded, arms across his middle. She took a deep breath, swung the bat as high as she could, and brought it down with all her strength on the crown of his head.

  The shock of it vibrated up her arms to her shoulders and she dropped the bat with a clunk and stood there gasping, trembling and drenched with sweat.

  “Mummy?” said a tiny, quavering voice from the foot of the stair. “Why is you not got pants on, Mummy?”

  Needing to keep calm for three-year-old Mandy, Bree soothes the little girl, binds Cameron with duct tape, and dumps him into the priest’s hole behind the kitchen. He refuses to tell her where Jemmy is, but she has a last resort: Mandy. When Jem was presumably spending the night with Cameron’s nephew, Bobby—but in reality being forced to touch the rocks at Craigh na Dun—Mandy woke in hysterics, insisting that Jem was gone and that “the wocks ate him!” Her parents, knowing the threat of those rocks all too well, were frightened—and still more so upon learning of Jem’s disappearance. In the chaos and hurry of trying to find him, and then of preparing for Roger and Buck to travel through the stones in search of him, no one had time to think about Mandy and what she’d said. But now she may be the only one who can find Jem.

  “CAN YOU TELL when Jem’s at school?”