“But it isn’t what you think!” Unable to stop me leaving the clearing, he was following me, arguing as he ducked low branches. “He needs you, Aunt, really he does! Ye must come back wi’ me!”
I didn’t answer him; I had reached my horse, and bent to undo the hobbles.
“Auntie Claire! Will ye no listen to me?” He loomed up on the far side of the horse, gawky height peering at me over the saddle. He looked very much like his father, his good-natured, half-homely face creased with anxiety.
“No,” I said briefly. I stuffed the hobbles into the saddlebag, and put my foot into the stirrup, swinging up with a satisfyingly majestic swish of skirts and petticoats. My dignified departure was hampered at this point by the fact that Young Ian had the horse’s reins in a death grip.
“Let go,” I said peremptorily.
“Not until ye hear me out,” he said. He glared up at me, jaw clenched with stubbornness, soft brown eyes ablaze. I glared back at him. Gangling as he was, he had Ian’s skinny muscularity; unless I was prepared to ride him down, there seemed little choice but to listen to him.
All right, I decided. Fat lot of good it would do, to him or his double-dealing uncle, but I’d listen.
“Talk,” I said, mustering what patience I could.
He drew a deep breath, eyeing me warily to see whether I meant it. Deciding that I did, he blew his breath out, making the soft brown hair over his brow flutter, and squared his shoulders to begin.
“Well,” he started, seeming suddenly unsure. “It…I…he…”
I made a low sound of exasperation in my throat. “Start at the beginning,” I said. “But don’t make a song and dance of it, hm?”
He nodded, teeth set in his upper lip as he concentrated.
“Well, there was the hell of a stramash broke out at the house, after ye left, when Uncle Jamie came back,” he began.
“I’ll just bet there was,” I said. Despite myself, I was conscious of a small stirring of curiosity, but fought it down, assuming an expression of complete indifference.
“I’ve never seen Uncle Jamie sae furious,” he said, watching my face carefully. “Nor Mother, either. They went at it hammer and tongs, the two o’ them. Father tried to quiet them, but it was like they didna even hear him. Uncle Jamie called Mother a meddling besom, and a lang-nebbit…and…and a lot of worse names,” he added, flushing.
“He shouldn’t have been angry with Jenny,” I said. “She was only trying to help—I think.” I felt sick with the knowledge that I had caused this rift, too. Jenny had been Jamie’s mainstay since the death of their mother when both were children. Was there no end to the damage I had caused by coming back?
To my surprise, Jenny’s son smiled briefly. “Well, it wasna all one-sided,” he said dryly. “My mother’s no the person to be taking abuse lying down, ye ken. Uncle Jamie had a few toothmarks on him before the end of it.” He swallowed, remembering.
“In fact, I thought they’d damage each other, surely; Mother went for Uncle Jamie wi’ an iron girdle, and he snatched it from her and threw it through the kitchen window. Scairt the chickens out o’ the yard,” he added, with a feeble grin.
“Less about chickens, Young Ian,” I said, looking down at him coldly. “Get on with it; I want to leave.”
“Well, then Uncle Jamie knocked over the bookshelf in the parlor—I dinna think he did it on purpose,” the lad added hastily, “he was just too fashed to see straight—and went out the door. Father stuck his head out the window and shouted at him where was he going, and he said he was going to find you.”
“Then why are you here, and not him?” I was leaning forward slightly, watching his hand on the reins; if his fingers showed signs of relaxation, perhaps I could twitch the rein out of his grasp.
Young Ian sighed. “Well, just as Uncle Jamie was setting out on his horse, Aunt…er…I mean his wi—” He blushed miserably. “Laoghaire. She…she came down the hill and into the dooryard.”
At this point, I gave up pretending indifference.
“And what happened then?”
He frowned. “There was an awful collieshangie, but I couldna hear much. Auntie…I mean Laoghaire—she doesna seem to know how to fight properly, like my Mam and Uncle Jamie. She just weeps and wails a lot. Mam says she snivels,” he added.
“Mmphm,” I said. “And so?”
Laoghaire had slid off her own mount, clutched Jamie by the leg, and more or less dragged him off as well, according to Young Ian. She had then subsided into a puddle in the dooryard, clutching Jamie about the knees, weeping and wailing as was her usual habit.
Unable to escape, Jamie had at last hauled Laoghaire to her feet, flung her bodily over his shoulder, and carried her into the house and up the stairs, ignoring the fascinated gazes of his family and servants.
“Right,” I said. I realized that I had been clenching my jaw, and consciously unclenched it. “So he sent you after me because he was too occupied with his wife. Bastard! The gall of him! He thinks he can just send someone to fetch me back, like a hired girl, because it doesn’t suit his convenience to come himself? He thinks he can have his cake and eat it, does he? Bloody arrogant, selfish, overbearing…Scot!” Distracted as I was by the picture of Jamie carrying Laoghaire upstairs, “Scot” was the worst epithet I could come up with on short notice.
My knuckles were white where my hand clutched the edge of the saddle. Not caring about subtlety any more, I leaned down, snatching for the reins.
“Let go!”
“But Auntie Claire, it’s not that!”
“What’s not that?” Caught by his tone of desperation, I glanced up. His long, narrow face was tight with the anguished need to make me understand.
“Uncle Jamie didna stay to tend Laoghaire!”
“Then why did he send you?”
He took a deep breath, renewing his grip on my reins.
“She shot him. He sent me to find ye, because he’s dying.”
* * *
“If you’re lying to me, Ian Murray,” I said, for the dozenth time, “you’ll regret it to the end of your life—which will be short!”
I had to raise my voice to be heard. The rising wind came whooshing past me, lifting my hair in streamers off my shoulders, whipping my skirts tight around my legs. The weather was suitably dramatic; great black clouds choked the mountain passes, boiling over the crags like seafoam, with a faint distant rumble of thunder, like far-off surf on packed sand.
Lacking breath, Young Ian merely shook his bowed head as he leaned into the wind. He was afoot, leading both ponies across a treacherously boggy stretch of ground near the edge of a tiny loch. I glanced instinctively at my wrist, missing my Rolex.
It was difficult to tell where the sun was, with the in-rolling storm filling half the western sky, but the upper edge of the dark-tinged clouds glowed a brilliant white that was almost gold. I had lost the knack of telling time by sun and sky, but thought it was no more than midafternoon.
Lallybroch lay several hours ahead; I doubted we would reach it by dark. Meaching my way reluctantly toward Craigh na Dun, I had taken nearly two days to reach the small wood where Young Ian had caught up with me. He had, he said, spent only one day in the pursuit; he had known roughly where I was headed, and he himself had shod the pony I rode; my tracks had been plain to him, where they showed in the mud-patches among the heather on the open moor.
Two days since I had left, and one—or more—on the journey back. Three days, then, since Jamie had been shot.
I could get few useful details from Young Ian; having succeeded in his mission, he wanted only to return to Lallybroch as fast as possible, and saw no point in further conversation. Jamie’s gunshot wound was in the left arm, he said. That was good, so far as it went. The ball had penetrated into Jamie’s side, as well. That wasn’t good. Jamie was conscious when last seen—that was good—but was starting a fever. Not good at all. As to the possible effects of shock, the type or severity of the fever, or what treatment had
so far been administered, Young Ian merely shrugged.
So perhaps Jamie was dying; perhaps he wasn’t. It wasn’t a chance I could take, as Jamie himself would know perfectly well. I wondered momentarily whether he might conceivably have shot himself, as a means of forcing me to return. Our last interview could have left him in little doubt as to my response had he come after me, or used force to make me return.
It was beginning to rain, in soft spatters that caught in my hair and lashes, blurring my sight like tears. Past the boggy spot, Young Ian had mounted again, leading the way upward to the final pass that led to Lallybroch.
Jamie was devious enough to have thought of such a plan, all right, and certainly courageous enough to have carried it out. On the other hand, I had never known him to be reckless. He had taken plenty of bold risks—marrying me being one of them, I thought ruefully—but never without an estimation of the cost, and a willingness to pay it. Would he have thought drawing me back to Lallybroch worth the chance of actually dying? That hardly seemed logical, and Jamie Fraser was a very logical man.
I pulled the hood of my cloak further over my head, to keep the increasing downpour out of my face. Young Ian’s shoulders and thighs were dark with wet, and the rain dripped from the brim of his slouch hat, but he sat straight in the saddle, ignoring the weather with the stoic nonchalance of a trueborn Scot.
Very well. Given that Jamie likely hadn’t shot himself, was he shot at all? He might have made up the story, and sent his nephew to tell it. On consideration, though, I thought it highly unlikely that Young Ian could have delivered the news so convincingly, were it false.
I shrugged, the movement sending a cold rivulet down inside the front of my cloak, and set myself to wait with what patience I could for the journey to be ended. Years in the practice of medicine had taught me not to anticipate; the reality of each case was bound to be unique, and so must be my response to it. My emotions, however, were much harder to control than my professional reactions.
Each time I had left Lallybroch, I had thought I would never return. Now here I was, going back once more. Twice now, I had left Jamie, knowing with certainty that I would never see him again. And yet here I was, going back to him like a bloody homing pigeon to its loft.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Jamie Fraser,” I muttered under my breath. “If you aren’t at death’s door when I get there, you’ll live to regret it!”
36
PRACTICAL AND APPLIED WITCHCRAFT
It was several hours past dark when we arrived at last, soaked to the skin. The house was silent, and dark, save for two dimly lighted windows downstairs in the parlor. There was a single warning bark from one of the dogs, but Young Ian shushed the animal, and after a quick, curious nosing at my stirrup, the black-and-white shape faded back into the darkness of the dooryard.
The warning had been enough to alert someone; as Young Ian led me into the hall, the door to the parlor opened. Jenny poked her head out, her face drawn with worry.
At the sight of Young Ian, she popped out into the hallway, her expression transformed to one of joyous relief, at once superseded by the righteous anger of a mother confronted by an errant offspring.
“Ian, ye wee wretch!” she said. “Where have ye been all this time? Your Da and I ha’ been worrit sick for ye!” She paused long enough to look him over anxiously. “You’re all right?”
At his nod, her lips grew tight again. “Aye, well. You’re for it now, laddie, I’ll tell ye! And just where the devil have ye been, anyway?”
Gangling, knob-jointed, and dripping wet, Young Ian looked like nothing so much as a drowned scarecrow, but he was still large enough to block me from his mother’s view. He didn’t answer Jenny’s scolding, but shrugged awkwardly and stepped aside, exposing me to his mother’s startled gaze.
If my resurrection from the dead had disconcerted her, this second reappearance stunned her. Her deep blue eyes, normally as slanted as her brother’s, opened so wide, they looked round. She stared at me for a long moment, without saying anything, then her gaze swiveled once more to her son.
“A cuckoo,” she said, almost conversationally. “That’s what ye are, laddie—a great cuckoo in the nest. God knows whose son ye were meant to be; it wasna mine.”
Young Ian flushed hotly, dropping his eyes as the red burned in his cheeks. He pushed the feathery damp hair out of his eyes with the back of one hand.
“I—well, I just…” he began, eyes on his boots, “I couldna just…”
“Oh, never mind about it now!” his mother snapped. “Get ye upstairs to your bed; your Da will deal wi’ ye in the morning.”
Ian glanced helplessly at the parlor door, then at me. He shrugged once more, looked at the sodden hat in his hands as though wondering how it had got there, and shuffled slowly down the hall.
Jenny stood quite still, eyes fixed on me, until the padded door at the end of the hallway closed with a soft thump behind Young Ian. Her face showed lines of strain, and the shadows of sleeplessness smudged her eyes. Still fineboned and erect, for once she looked her age, and more.
“So you’re back,” she said flatly.
Seeing no point in answering the obvious, I nodded briefly. The house was quiet around us, and full of shadows, the hallway lighted only by a three-pronged candlestick set on the table.
“Never mind about it now,” I said, softly, so as not to disturb the house’s slumber. There was, after all, only one thing of importance at the moment. “Where’s Jamie?”
After a small hesitation, she nodded as well, accepting my presence for the moment. “In there,” she said, waving toward the parlor door.
I started toward the door, then paused. There was the one thing more. “Where’s Laoghaire?” I asked.
“Gone,” she said. Her eyes were flat and dark in the candlelight, unreadable.
I nodded in response, and stepped through the door, closing it gently but firmly behind me.
Too long to be laid on the sofa, Jamie lay on a camp bed set up before the fire. Asleep or unconscious, his profile rose dark and sharp-edged against the light of the glowing coals, unmoving.
Whatever he was, he wasn’t dead—at least not yet. My eyes growing accustomed to the dim light of the fire, I could see the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath nightshirt and quilt. A flask of water and a brandy bottle sat on the small table by the bed. The padded chair by the fire had a shawl thrown over its back; Jenny had been sitting there, watching over her brother.
There seemed no need now for haste. I untied the strings at the neck of my cloak, and spread the soggy garment over the chairback, taking the shawl in substitute. My hands were cold; I put them under my arms, hugging myself, to bring them to something like a normal temperature before I touched him.
When I did venture to place a thawed hand on his forehead, I nearly jerked it back. He was hot as a just-fired pistol, and he twitched and moaned at my touch. Fever, indeed. I stood looking down at him for a moment, then carefully moved to the side of the bed and sat down in Jenny’s chair. I didn’t think he would sleep long, with a temperature like that, and it seemed a shame to wake him needlessly soon, merely to examine him.
The cloak behind me dripped water on the floor, a slow, arrhythmic patting. It reminded me unpleasantly of an old Highland superstition—the “death-drop.” Just before a death occurs, the story goes, the sound of water dripping is heard in the house, by those sensitive to such things.
I wasn’t, thank heaven, subject to noticing supernatural phenomena of that sort. No, I thought wryly, it takes something like a crack through time to get your attention. The thought made me smile, if only briefly, and dispelled the frisson I had felt at the thought of the death-drop.
As the rain chill left me, though, I still felt uneasy, and for obvious reasons. It wasn’t that long ago that I had stood by another makeshift bed, deep in the night-watches, and contemplated death, and the waste of a marriage. The thoughts I had begun in the wood hadn’t stopped on the hasty jo
urney back to Lallybroch, and they continued now, without my conscious volition.
Honor had led Frank to his decision—to keep me as his wife, and raise Brianna as his own. Honor, and an unwillingness to decline a responsibility he felt was his. Well, here before me lay another honorable man.
Laoghaire and her daughters, Jenny and her family, the Scots prisoners, the smugglers, Mr. Willoughby and Geordie, Fergus and the tenants—how many other responsibilities had Jamie shouldered, through our years apart?
Frank’s death had absolved me of one of my own obligations; Brianna herself of another. The Hospital Board, in their eternal wisdom, had severed the single great remaining tie that bound me to that life. I had had time, with Joe Abernathy’s help, to relieve myself of the smaller responsibilities, to depute and delegate, divest and resolve.
Jamie had had neither warning nor choice about my reappearance in his life; no time to make decisions or resolve conflicts. And he was not one to abandon his responsibilities, even for the sake of love.
Yes, he’d lied to me. Hadn’t trusted me to recognize his responsibilities, to stand by him—or to leave him—as his circumstances demanded. He’d been afraid. So had I; afraid that he wouldn’t choose me, confronted with the struggle between a twenty-year-old love and a present-day family. So I’d run away.
“Who you jiving, L.J.?” I heard Joe Abernathy’s voice say, derisive and affectionate. I had fled toward Craigh na Dun with all the speed and decision of a condemned felon approaching the steps of the gallows. Nothing had slowed my journey but the hope that Jamie would come after me.
True, the pangs of conscience and wounded pride had spurred me on, but the one moment when Young Ian had said, “He’s dying,” had shown those up for the flimsy things they were.
My marriage to Jamie had been for me like the turning of a great key, each small turn setting in play the intricate fall of tumblers within me. Bree had been able to turn that key as well, edging closer to the unlocking of the door of myself. But the final turn of the lock was frozen—until I had walked into the printshop in Edinburgh, and the mechanism had sprung free with a final, decisive click. The door now was ajar, the light of an unknown future shining through its crack. But it would take more strength than I had alone to push it open.
I watched the rise and fall of his breath, and the play of light and shadow on the strong, clean lines of his face, and knew that nothing truly mattered between us but the fact that we both still lived. So here I was. Again. And whatever the cost of it might be to him or me, here I stayed.
I didn’t realize that his eyes had opened until he spoke.
“Ye came back, then,” he said softly. “I knew ye would.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he was still talking, eyes fixed on my face, pupils dilated to pools of darkness.
“My love,” he said, almost whispering. “God, ye do look so lovely, wi’ your great eyes all gold, and your hair so soft round your face.” He brushed his tongue across dry lips. “I knew ye must forgive me, Sassenach, once ye knew.”
Once I knew? My brows shot up, but I didn’t speak; he had more to say.
“I was so afraid to lose ye again, mo chridhe,” he murmured. “So afraid. I havena loved anyone but you, my Sassenach, never since the day I saw ye—but I couldna…I couldna bear…” His voice drifted off in an unintelligible mumble, and his eyes closed again, lashes lying dark against the high curve of his cheek.
I sat still, wondering what I should do. As I watched, his eyes opened suddenly once again. Heavy and drowsy with fever, they sought my face.
“It willna be long, Sassenach,” he said, as though reassuring me. One corner of his mouth twitched in an attempt at a smile. “Not long. Then I shall touch ye once more. I do long to touch you.”
“Oh, Jamie,” I said. Moved by tenderness, I reached out and laid my hand along his burning cheek.
His eyes snapped wide with shock, and he jerked bolt upright in bed, letting out a bloodcurdling yell of anguish as the movement jarred his wounded arm.
“Oh God, oh Christ, oh Jesus Lord God Almighty!” he said, bent half-breathless and clutching at his left arm. “You’re real! Bloody stinking filthy pig-swiving hell! Oh, Christ!”
“Are you all right?” I said, rather inanely. I could hear startled exclamations from the floor above, muffled by the thick planks, and the thump of feet as one after another of Lallybroch’s inhabitants leapt from their beds to investigate the uproar.
Jenny’s head, eyes even wider than before, poked through the parlor door. Jamie saw her, and somehow found sufficient breath to roar “Get out!” before doubling up again with an agonized groan.
“Je-sus,” he said between clenched teeth. “What in God’s holy name are ye doing here, Sassenach?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” I said. “You sent for me. And what do you mean, I’m real?”
He unclenched his jaw and tentatively loosened his grip on his left arm. The resultant sensation proving unsatisfactory, he promptly grabbed it again and said several things in French involving the reproductive organs of assorted saints and animals.
“For God’s sake, lie down!” I said. I took him by the shoulders and eased him back onto the pillows, noting with some alarm how close his bones were to the surface of his heated skin.
“I thought ye were a fever dream, ’til you touched me,” he said, gasping. “What the hell d’ye mean, popping up by my bed and scarin’ me to death?” He grimaced in pain. “Christ, it feels like my damn arm’s come off at the shoulder. Och, bugger it!” he exclaimed, as I firmly detached the fingers of his right hand from his left arm.
“Didn’t you send Young Ian to tell me you were dying?” I said, deftly rolling back the sleeve of his nightshirt. The arm was wound in a huge bandage above the elbow, and I groped for the end of the linen strip.
“Me? No! Ow, that hurts!”
“It’ll hurt worse before I’m through with you,” I said, carefully unwrapping. “You mean the little bastard came after me on his own? You didn’t want me to come back?”
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