Outlander 03 - Voyager

by Diana Gabaldon

  Jamie stared at the boy in shock. There had been talk, then, and Willie had heard it. He had delayed his going too long.

  He drew a deep breath, and then another, and hoped that his voice would not tremble.

  “I take it back,” he said softly. “I shouldna have used the word, my lord.”

  He wanted to kneel and embrace the boy, or pick him up and comfort him against his shoulder—but that was not a gesture a groom might make to an earl, even a young one. The palm of his left hand stung, and he curled his fingers tight over the only fatherly caress he was ever likely to give his son.

  Willie knew how an earl should behave; he was making a masterful effort to subdue his tears, sniffing ferociously and swiping at his face with a sleeve.

  “Allow me, my lord.” Jamie did kneel then, and wiped the little boy’s face gently with his own coarse handkerchief. Willie’s eyes looked at him over the cotton folds, red-rimmed and woeful.

  “Have you really got to go, Mac?” he asked, in a very small voice.

  “Aye, I have.” He looked into the dark blue eyes, so heartbreakingly like his own, and suddenly didn’t give a damn what was right or who saw. He pulled the boy roughly to him, hugging him tight against his heart, holding the boy’s face close to his shoulder, that Willie might not see the quick tears that fell into his thick, soft hair.

  Willie’s arms went around his neck and clung tight. He could feel the small, sturdy body shake against him with the force of suppressed sobbing. He patted the flat little back, and smoothed Willie’s hair, and murmured things in Gaelic that he hoped the boy would not understand.

  At length, he took the boy’s arms from his neck and put him gently away.

  “Come wi’ me to my room, Willie; I shall give ye something to keep.”

  He had long since moved from the hayloft, taking over Hughes’s snuggery beside the tack room when the elderly head groom retired. It was a small room, and very plainly furnished, but it had the twin virtues of warmth and privacy.

  Besides the bed, the stool, and a chamber pot, there was a small table, on which stood the few books that he owned, a large candle in a pottery candlestick, and a smaller candle, thick and squat, that stood to one side before a small statue of the Virgin. It was a cheap wooden carving that Jenny had sent him, but it had been made in France, and was not without artistry.

  “What’s that little candle for?” Willie asked. “Grannie says only stinking Papists burn candles in front of heathen images.”

  “Well, I am a stinking Papist,” Jamie said, with a wry twist of his mouth. “It’s no a heathen image, though; it’s a statue of the Blessed Mother.”

  “You are?” Clearly this revelation only added to the boy’s fascination. “Why do Papists burn candles before statues, then?”

  Jamie rubbed a hand through his hair. “Aye, well. It’s…maybe a way of praying—and remembering. Ye light the candle, and say a prayer and think of people ye care for. And while it burns, the flame remembers them for ye.”

  “Who do you remember?” Willie glanced up at him. His hair was standing on end, rumpled by his earlier distress, but his blue eyes were clear with interest.

  “Oh, a good many people. My family in the Highlands—my sister and her family. Friends. My wife.” And sometimes the candle burned in memory of a young and reckless girl named Geneva, but he did not say that.

  Willie frowned. “You haven’t got a wife.”

  “No. Not anymore. But I remember her always.”

  Willie put out a stubby forefinger and cautiously touched the little statue. The woman’s hands were spread in welcome, a tender maternity engraved on the lovely face.

  “I want to be a stinking Papist, too,” Willie said firmly.

  “Ye canna do that!” Jamie exclaimed, half-amused, half-touched at the notion. “Your grandmama and your auntie would go mad.”

  “Would they froth at the mouth, like that mad fox you killed?” Willie brightened.

  “I shouldna wonder,” Jamie said dryly.

  “I want to do it!” The small, clear features were set in determination. “I won’t tell Grannie or Auntie Isobel; I won’t tell anybody. Please, Mac! Please let me! I want to be like you!”

  Jamie hesitated, both touched by the boy’s earnestness, and suddenly wanting to leave his son with something more than the carved wooden horse he had made to leave as a farewell present. He tried to remember what Father McMurtry had taught them in the schoolroom about baptism. It was all right for a lay person to do it, he thought, provided that the situation was an emergency, and no priest was to hand.

  It might be stretching a point to call the present situation an emergency, but…a sudden impulse made him reach down the jug of water that he kept on the sill.

  The eyes that were like his watched, wide and solemn, as he carefully brushed the soft brown hair back from the high brow. He dipped three fingers into the water and carefully traced a cross on the lad’s forehead.

  “I baptize thee William James,” he said softly, “in the name o’ the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  Willie blinked, crossing his eyes as a drop of water rolled down his nose. He stuck out his tongue to catch it, and Jamie laughed, despite himself.

  “Why did you call me William James?” Willie asked curiously. “My other names are Clarence Henry George.” He made a face; Clarence wasn’t his idea of a good name.

  Jamie hid a smile. “Ye get a new name when you’re baptized; James is your special Papist name. It’s mine, too.”

  “It is?” Willie was delighted. “I’m a stinking Papist now, like you?”

  “Aye, as much as I can manage, at least.” He smiled down at Willie, then, struck by another impulse, reached into the neck of his shirt.

  “Here. Keep this, too, to remember me by.” He laid the beechwood rosary gently over Willie’s head. “Ye canna let anyone see that, though,” he warned. “And for God’s sake, dinna tell anyone you’re a Papist.”

  “I won’t,” Willie promised. “Not a soul.” He tucked the rosary into his shirt, patting carefully to be sure that it was hidden.

  “Good.” Jamie reached out and ruffled Willie’s hair in dismissal. “It’s almost time for your tea; ye’d best go on up to the house now.”

  Willie started for the door, but stopped halfway, suddenly distressed again, with a hand pressed flat to his chest.

  “You said to keep this to remember you. But I haven’t got anything for you to remember me by!”

  Jamie smiled slightly. His heart was squeezed so tight, he thought he could not draw breath to speak, but he forced the words out.

  “Dinna fret yourself,” he said. “I’ll remember ye.”

  17

  MONSTERS RISING

  Loch Ness

  August 1968

  Brianna blinked, brushing back a bright web of hair caught by the wind. “I’d almost forgotten what the sun looks like,” she said, squinting at the object in question, shining with unaccustomed ferocity on the dark waters of Loch Ness.

  Her mother stretched luxuriously, enjoying the light wind. “To say nothing of what fresh air is like. I feel like a toadstool that’s been growing in the dark for weeks—all pale and squashy.”

  “Fine scholars the two of you would make,” Roger said, but grinned. All three of them were in high spirits. After the arduous slog through the prison records to narrow the search to Ardsmuir, they had had a run of luck. The records for Ardsmuir were complete, in one spot, and—in comparison to most others—remarkably clear. Ardsmuir had been a prison for only fifteen years; following its renovation by Jacobite prison-labor, it had been converted into a small permanent garrison, and the prison population dispersed—mostly transported to the American Colonies.

  “I still can’t imagine why Fraser wasn’t sent along to America with the rest,” Roger said. He had had a moment’s panic there, going over and over the list of transported convicts from Ardsmuir, searching the names one by one, nearly letter by letter, and st
ill finding no Frasers. He had been certain that Jamie Fraser had died in prison, and had been in a cold sweat of fear over the thought of telling the Randall women—until the flip of a page had showed him Fraser’s parole to a place named Helwater.

  “I don’t know,” Claire said, “but it’s a bloody good thing he wasn’t. He’s—he was—” she caught herself quickly, but not quickly enough to stop Roger noticing the slip—“terribly, terribly seasick.” She gestured at the surface of the loch before them, dancing with tiny waves. “Even going out on something like that would turn him green in minutes.”

  Roger glanced at Brianna with interest. “Are you seasick?”

  She shook her head, bright hair lifting in the wind. “Nah.” She patted her bare midriff smugly. “Cast-iron.”

  Roger laughed. “Want to go out, then? It’s your holiday, after all.”

  “Really? Could we? Can you fish in there?” Brianna shaded her eyes, looking eagerly out over the dark water.

  “Certainly. I’ve caught salmon and eels many a time in Loch Ness,” Roger assured her. “Come along; we’ll rent a wee boat at the dock in Drumnadrochit.”

  The drive to Drumnadrochit was a delight. The day was one of those clear, bright summer days that cause tourists from the South to stampede into Scotland in droves during August and September. With one of Fiona’s larger breakfasts inside him, one of her lunches stowed in a basket in the boot, and Brianna Randall, long hair blowing in the wind, seated beside him, Roger was strongly disposed to consider that all was right with the world.

  He allowed himself to dwell with satisfaction on the results of their researches. It had meant taking additional leave from his college for the summer term, but it had been worth it.

  After finding the record of James Fraser’s parole, it had taken another two weeks of slog and inquiry—even a quick weekend trip by Roger and Bree to the Lake District, another by all three of them to London—and then the sight that had made Brianna whoop out loud in the middle of the British Museum’s sacrosanct Reading Room, causing their hasty departure amid waves of icy disapproval. The sight of the Royal Warrant of Pardon, stamped with the seal of George III, Rex Angleterre, dated 1764, bearing the name of “James Alexdrl M’Kensie Frazier.”

  “We’re getting close,” Roger had said, gloating over the photocopy of the Warrant of Pardon. “Bloody close!”

  “Close?” Brianna had said, but then had been distracted by the sight of their bus approaching, and had not pursued the matter. Roger had caught Claire’s eye on him, though; she knew very well what he meant.

  She would, of course, have been thinking of it; he wondered whether Brianna had. Claire had disappeared into the past in 1945, vanishing through the circle of standing stones on Craigh na Dun and reappearing in 1743. She had lived with Jamie Fraser for nearly three years, then returned through the stones. And she had come back nearly three years past the time of her original disappearance, in April of 1948.

  All of which meant—just possibly—that if she were disposed to try the trip back through the stones once more, she would likely arrive twenty years past the time she had left—in 1766. And 1766 was only two years past the latest known date at which Jamie Fraser had been located, alive and well. If he had survived another two years, and if Roger could find him…

  “There it is!” Brianna said suddenly. “‘Boats for Rent.’” She pointed at the sign in the window of the dockside pub, and Roger nosed the car into a parking slot outside, with no further thought of Jamie Fraser.

  “I wonder why short men are so often enamored of very tall women?” Claire’s voice behind him echoed Roger’s thoughts with an uncanny accuracy—and not for the first time.

  “Moth and flame syndrome, perhaps?” Roger suggested, frowning at the diminutive barman’s evident fascination with Brianna. He and Claire were standing before the counter for rentals, waiting for the clerk to write up the receipt while Brianna bought bottles of Coca-Cola and brown ale to augment their lunch.

  The young barman, who came up approximately to Brianna’s armpit, was hopping to and fro, offering pickled eggs and slices of smoked tongue, eyes worshipfully upturned to the yellow-haltered goddess before him. From her laughter, Brianna appeared to think the man “cute.”

  “I always told Bree not to get involved with short men,” Claire observed, watching this.

  “Did you?” Roger said dryly. “Somehow I didn’t envision you being all that much in the motherly advice line.”

  She laughed, disregarding his momentary sourness. “Well, I’m not, all that much. When you notice an important principle like that, though, it seems one’s motherly duty to pass it along.”

  “Something wrong with short men, is there?” Roger inquired.

  “They tend to turn mean if they don’t get their way,” Claire answered. “Like small yapping dogs. Cute and fluffy, but cross them and you’re likely to get a nasty nip in the ankle.”

  Roger laughed. “This observation is the result of years of experience, I take it?”

  “Oh, yes.” She nodded, glancing up at him. “I’ve never met an orchestra conductor over five feet tall. Vicious specimens, practically all of them. But tall men”—her lips curved slightly as she surveyed his six-feet-three-inch frame—“tall men are almost always very sweet and gentle.”

  “Sweet, eh?” said Roger, with a cynical glance at the barman, who was cutting up a jellied eel for Brianna. Her face expressed a wary distaste, but she leaned forward, wrinkling her nose as she took the bite offered on a fork.

  “With women,” Claire amplified. “I’ve always thought it’s because they realize that they don’t have anything to prove; when it’s perfectly obvious that they can do anything they like whether you want them to or not, they don’t need to try to prove it.”

  “While a short man—” Roger prompted.

  “While a short one knows he can’t do anything unless you let him, and the knowledge drives him mad, so he’s always trying something on, just to prove he can.”

  “Mmphm.” Roger made a Scottish noise in the back of his throat, meant to convey both appreciation of Claire’s acuity, and general suspicion of what the barman might be wanting to prove to Brianna.

  “Thanks,” he said to the clerk, who shoved the receipt across the counter to him. “Ready, Bree?” he asked.

  The loch was calm and the fishing slow, but it was pleasant on the water, with the August sun warm on their backs and the scent of raspberry canes and sun-warmed pine trees wafting from the nearby shore. Full of lunch, they all grew drowsy, and before long, Brianna was curled up in the bow, asleep with her head pillowed on Roger’s jacket. Claire sat in the stern, blinking, but still awake.

  “What about short and tall women?” Roger asked, resuming their earlier conversation as he sculled slowly across the loch. He glanced over his shoulder at the amazing length of Brianna’s legs, awkwardly curled under her. “Same thing? The little ones nasty?”

  Claire shook her head meditatively, the curls beginning to work their way loose from her hairclip. “No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with size. I think it’s more a matter of whether they see men as The Enemy, or just see them as men, and on the whole, rather like them for it.”

  “Oh, to do with women’s liberation, is it?”

  “No, not at all,” Claire said. “I saw just the same kinds of behavior between men and women in 1743 that you see now. Some differences, of course, in how they each behave, but not so much in how they behave to each other.”

  She looked out over the dark waters of the loch, shading her eyes with her hand. She might have been keeping an eye out for otters and floating logs, but Roger thought that far-seeing gaze was looking a bit farther than the cliffs of the opposite shore.

  “You like men, don’t you?” he said quietly. “Tall men.”

  She smiled briefly, not looking at him.

  “One,” she said softly.

  “Will you go, then—if I can find him?” he reste
d his oars momentarily, watching her.

  She drew a deep breath before answering. The wind flushed her cheeks with pink and molded the fabric of the white shirt to her figure, showing off a high bosom and a slender waist. Too young to be a widow, he thought, too lovely to be wasted.

  “I don’t know,” she said, a little shakily. “The thought of it—or rather, the thoughts of it! On the one hand, to find Jamie—and then, on the other, to…go through again.” A shudder went through her, closing her eyes.

  “It’s indescribable, you know,” she said, eyes still closed as though she saw inside them the ring of stones on Craigh na Dun. “Horrible, but horrible in a way that isn’t like other horrible things, so you can’t say.” She opened her eyes and smiled wryly at him.

  “A bit like trying to tell a man what having a baby is like; he can more or less grasp the idea that it’s painful, but he isn’t equipped actually to understand what it feels like.”

  Roger grunted with amusement. “Oh, aye? Well, there’s some difference, you know. I’ve actually heard those bloody stones.” He shivered himself, involuntarily. The memory of the night, three months ago, when Gillian Edgars had gone through the stones, was not one he willingly called to mind; it had come back to him in nightmares several times, though. He heaved strongly on the oars, trying to erase it.

  “Like being torn apart, isn’t it?” he said, his eyes intent on hers. “There’s something pulling at you, ripping, dragging, and not just outside—inside you as well, so you feel your skull will fly to pieces any moment. And the filthy noise.” He shuddered again. Claire’s face had gone slightly pale.

  “I didn’t know you could hear them,” she said. “You didn’t tell me.”

  “It didn’t seem important.” He studied her a moment, as he pulled, then added quietly, “Bree heard them as well.”

  “I see.” She turned to look back over the loch, where the wake of the tiny boat spread its V-shaped wings. Far behind, the waves from the passage of a larger boat reflected back from the cliffs and joined again in the center of the loch, making a long, humped form of glistening water—a standing wave, a phenomenon of the loch that had often been mistaken for a sighting of the monster.