Текст книги "A Breath Of Snow And Ashes"

Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 94 страниц)

“I don’t know,” he’d said. “But for you—if there’s room for doubt—I say, take it.”

If Jamie were disposed to follow that advice, Bree should be home soon.



“I’M FINE,” I said firmly. “Perfectly fine.”

Bree narrowed her eyes at me.

“Sure you are,” she said. “You look like you’ve been run over by a locomotive. Two locomotives.”

“Yes,” I said, and touched my split lip gingerly. “Well. Yes. Other than that, though …”

“Are you hungry? Sit down, Mama, I’ll make you some tea, then maybe a little supper.”

I wasn’t hungry, didn’t want tea, and particularly didn’t want to sit down—not after a long day on horseback. Brianna was already taking down the teapot from its shelf above the sideboard, though, and I couldn’t find the proper words to stop her. All of a sudden, I seemed to have no words at all. I turned toward Jamie, helpless.

He somehow divined my feeling, though he couldn’t have read much of anything on my face, given its current state. He stepped forward, though, and took the teapot from her, murmuring something too low for me to catch. She frowned at him, glanced at me, then back, still frowning. Then her face changed a little, and she came toward me, looking searchingly into my face.

“A bath?” she asked quietly. “Shampoo?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and my shoulders sagged in grateful relief. “Please.”

I did sit down then, after all, and let her sponge my hands and feet, and wash my hair in a basin of warm water drawn from the cauldron in the hearth. She did it quietly, humming under her breath, and I began to relax under the soothing scrub of her long, strong fingers.

I’d slept—from sheer exhaustion—part of the way, leaning on Jamie’s chest. There’s no way of achieving real rest on horseback, though, and I found myself now close to nodding off, noticing only in a dreamy, detached sort of way that the water in the basin had turned a grubby, cloudy red, full of grit and leaf fragments.

I’d changed to a clean shift; the feel of the worn linen on my skin was sheer luxury, cool and smooth.

Bree was humming softly, under her breath. What was it … “Mr. Tambourine Man,” I thought. One of those sweetly silly songs of the sixt—

1968.

I gasped, and Bree’s hands gripped my head, steadying me.

“Mama? Are you all right? Did I touch something—”

“No! No, I’m fine,” I said, looking down into the swirls of dirt and blood. I took a deep breath, heart pounding. “Perfectly fine. Just—began to doze off, that’s all.”

She snorted, but took her hands away and went to fetch a pitcher of water for rinsing, leaving me gripping the edge of the table and trying not to shudder.

You don’t act afraid of men. You oughta act more afraid. That particularly ironic echo came to me clearly, along with the outline of the young man’s head, leonine hair seen silhouetted by the firelight. I couldn’t recall his face clearly—but surely I would have noticed that hair?

Jamie had taken my arm, afterward, and led me out from under my sheltering tree, into the clearing. The fire had been scattered during the fight; there were blackened rocks and patches of singed and flattened grass here and there—among the bodies. He had led me slowly from one to another. At the last, he had paused, and said quietly, “Ye see that they are dead?”

I did, and knew why he had shown me—so I need not fear their return, or their vengeance. But I had not thought to count them. Or to look closely at their faces. Even had I been sure how many there were … another shiver struck me, and Bree wrapped a warm towel around my shoulders, murmuring words I didn’t hear for the questions clamoring in my head.

Was Donner among the dead? Or had he heeded me, when I’d told him that if he were wise, he’d run? He hadn’t struck me as a wise young man.

He had struck me as a coward, though.

Warm water sluiced around my ears, drowning out the sound of Jamie’s and Brianna’s voices overhead; I caught only a word or two, but when I sat back up, with water dripping down my neck, clutching a towel to my hair, Bree was reluctantly moving toward her cloak, hung on the peg by the door.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Mama?” The worried frown was back between her brows, but this time I could muster a few words of reassurance.

“Thank you, darling; that was wonderful,” I said, with complete sincerity. “All I want just now is sleep,” I added with somewhat less.

I was still terribly tired, but now completely wakeful. What I did want was … well, I didn’t know quite what I did want, but a general absence of solicitous company was on the list. Besides, I’d caught a glimpse of Roger earlier, bloodstained, white, and swaying with weariness; I wasn’t the only victim of the recent unpleasantness.

“Go home, lass,” Jamie said softly. He swung the cloak from its peg and over her shoulders, patting her gently. “Feed your man. Take him to bed, and say a prayer for him. I’ll mind your mother, aye?”

Bree’s gaze swung between us, blue and troubled, but I put on what I hoped was a reassuring expression—it hurt to do it, rather—and after a moment’s hesitation, she hugged me tight, kissed my forehead very gently, and left.

Jamie shut the door and stood with his back against it, hands behind him. I was used to the impassive facade he normally used to shield his thoughts when troubled or angry; he wasn’t using it, and the expression on his face troubled me no end.

“You mustn’t worry about me,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “I’m not traumatized, or anything of that sort.”

“I mustn’t?” he asked guardedly. “Well … perhaps I wouldna, if I kent what ye meant by it.”

“Oh.” I blotted my damp face gingerly, and patted at my neck with the towel. “Well. It means … very much injured—or dreadfully shocked. It’s Greek, I think—the root word, I mean, ‘trauma.’”

“Oh, aye? And you’re not … shocked. Ye say.”

His eyes narrowed, as he examined me with the sort of critical attention usually employed when contemplating the purchase of expensive bloodstock.

“I’m fine,” I said, backing away a little. “Just—I’m all right. Only a bit … shaken.”

He took a step toward me, and I backed up abruptly, aware belatedly that I was clutching the towel to my bosom as though it were a shield. I forced myself to lower it, and felt blood prickle unpleasantly in patches over face and neck.

He stood very still, regarding me with that same narrow look. Then his gaze dropped to the floor between us. He stood as though deep in thought, and then his big hands flexed. Once, twice. Very slowly. And I heard—heard clearly—the sound of Arvin Hodgepile’s vertebrae parting one from another.

Jamie’s head jerked up, startled, and I realized that I was standing on the other side of the chair from him, the towel wadded and pressed against my mouth. My elbows moved like rusty hinges, stiff and slow, but I got the towel down. My lips were nearly as stiff, but I spoke, too.

“I am a little shaken, yes,” I said very clearly. “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry. I don’t want you to worry.”

The troubled scrutiny in his eyes wavered suddenly, like the glass of a window struck by a stone, in the split second before it shatters, and he shut his eyes. He swallowed once, and opened them again.

“Claire,” he said very softly, and the smashed and splintered fragments showed clear, sharp and jagged in his eyes. “I have been raped. And ye say I must not worry for ye?”

“Oh, God damn it!” I flung the towel on the floor, and immediately wished I had it back again. I felt naked, standing in my shift, and hated the crawling of my skin with a sudden passion that made me slap my thigh to kill it.

“Damn, damn, damn it! I don’t want you to have to think of that again. I don’t!” And yet I had known from the first that this would happen.

I took hold of the chairback with both hands and held tight, and tried to force my own gaze into his, wanting so badly to throw myself upon those glittering shards, to shield him from them.

“Look,” I said, steadying my voice. “I don’t want—I don’t want to make you recall things better left forgotten.”

The corner of his mouth actually twitched at that.

“God,” he said, in something like wonder. “Ye think I’d forgot any of it?”

“Maybe not,” I said, surrendering. I looked at him through swimming eyes. “But—oh, Jamie, I so wanted you to forget!”

He put out a hand, very delicately, and touched the tip of his index finger to the tip of mine, where I clutched the chair.

“Dinna mind it,” he said softly, and withdrew the finger. “It’s no matter now. Will ye rest a bit, Sassenach? Or eat, maybe?”

“No. I don’t want … no.” In fact, I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to do anything at all. Other than unzip my skin, climb out, and run—and that didn’t seem feasible. I took a few deep breaths, hoping to settle myself and go back to that nice sense of utter exhaustion.

Should I ask him about Donner? But what was there to ask? “Did you happen to kill a man with long, tangled hair?” They’d all looked like that, to some extent. Donner had been—or possibly still was—an Indian, but no one would have noticed that in the dark, in the heat of fighting.

“How—how is Roger?” I asked, for lack of anything better to say. “And Ian? Fergus?”

He looked a little startled, as though he had forgotten their existence.

“Them? The lads are well enough. No one took any hurt in the fight. We had luck.”

He hesitated, then took a careful step toward me, watching my face. I didn’t scream or bolt, and he took another, coming close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body. Not startled this time, and chilly in my damp shift, I relaxed a little, swaying toward him, and saw the tension in his own shoulders let go slightly, seeing it.

He touched my face, very gently. The blood throbbed just below the surface, tender, and I had to brace myself not to flinch away from his touch. He saw it, and drew back his hand a little, so that it hovered just above my skin—I could feel the heat of his palm.

“Will it heal?” he asked, fingertips moving over the split in my left brow, then down the minefield of my cheek to the scrape on my jaw where Harley Boble’s boot had just missed making a solid connection that would have broken my neck.

“Of course it will. You know that; you’ve seen worse on battlefields.” I would have smiled in reassurance, but didn’t want to open the deep split in my lip again, and so made a sort of pouting goldfish mouth, which took him by surprise and made him smile.

“Aye, I know.” He ducked his head a little, shy. “It’s only …” His hand still hovered near my face, an expression of troubled anxiety on his own. “Oh, God, mo nighean donn,” he said softly. “Oh, Christ, your lovely face.”

“Can you not bear to look at it?” I asked, turning my own eyes away and feeling a sharp little pang at the thought, but trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. It would heal, after all.

His fingers touched my chin, gently but firmly, and drew it up, so that I faced him again. His mouth tightened a little as his gaze moved slowly over my battered face, taking inventory. His eyes were soft and dark in the candlelight, the corners tight with pain.

“No,” he said quietly, “I cannot bear it. The sight of ye tears my heart. And it fills me with such rage I think I must kill someone or burst. But by the God who made ye, Sassenach, I’ll not lie with ye and be unable to look ye in the face.”

“Lie with me?” I said blankly. “What … you mean now?”

His hand dropped from my chin, but he looked steadily at me, not blinking.

“Well … aye. I do.”

Had my jaw not been so swollen, my mouth would have dropped open in pure astonishment.

“Ah … why?”

“Why?” he repeated. He dropped his gaze then, and made the odd shrugging motion that he made when embarrassed or discomposed. “I—well—it seems … necessary.”

I had a thoroughly unsuitable urge to laugh.

“Necessary? Do you think it’s like being thrown by a horse? I ought to get straight back on?”

His head jerked up and he shot me an angry glance.

“No,” he said, between clenched teeth. He swallowed hard and visibly, obviously reining in strong feelings. “Are ye—are ye badly damaged, then?”

I stared at him as best I could, through my swollen lids.

“Is that a joke of some—oh,” I said, it finally dawning on me what he meant. I felt heat rise in my face, and my bruises throbbed.

I took a deep breath, to be sure of being able to speak steadily.

“I have been beaten to a bloody pulp, Jamie, and abused in several nasty ways. But only one … there was only the one who actually … He—he wasn’t … rough.” I swallowed, but the hard knot in my throat didn’t budge perceptibly. Tears made the candlelight blur so that I couldn’t see his face, and I looked away, blinking.

“No!” I said, my voice sounding rather louder than I intended. “I’m not … damaged.”

He said something in Gaelic under his breath, short and explosive, and shoved himself away from the table. His stool fell over with a loud crash, and he kicked it. Then he kicked it again, and again, and stamped on it with such violence that bits of wood flew across the kitchen and struck the pie safe with little pinging sounds.

I sat completely still, too shocked and numb to feel distress. Should I not have told him? I wondered vaguely. But he knew, surely. He had asked, when he found me. “How many?” he had demanded. And then had said, “Kill them all.”

But then … to know something was one thing, and to be told the details another. I did know that, and watched with a dim sense of guilty sorrow as he kicked away the splinters of the stool and flung himself at the window. It was shuttered, but he stood, hands braced on the sill and his back turned to me, shoulders heaving. I couldn’t tell if he was crying.

The wind was rising; there was a squall coming in from the west. The shutters rattled, and the night-smoored fire spouted puffs of soot as the wind came down the chimney. Then the gust passed, and there was no sound but the small sudden crack! of an ember in the hearth.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last, in a small voice.

Jamie swiveled on his heel at once and glared at me. He wasn’t crying, but he had been; his cheeks were wet.

“Don’t you dare be sorry!” he roared. “I willna have it, d’ye hear?” He took a giant step toward the table and crashed his fist down on it, hard enough to make the saltcellar jump and fall over. “Don’t be sorry!”

I had closed my eyes in reflex, but forced myself to open them again.

“All right,” I said. I felt terribly, terribly tired again, and very much like crying myself. “I won’t.”

There was a charged silence. I could hear chestnuts falling in the grove behind the house, dislodged by the wind. One, and then another, and another, a rain of muffled tiny thumps. Then Jamie drew a deep, shuddering breath, and wiped a sleeve across his face.

I put my elbows on the table and leaned my head on my hands; it seemed much too heavy to hold up anymore.

“Necessary,” I said, more or less calmly to the tabletop. “What did you mean, necessary?”

“Does it not occur to you that ye might be with child?” He’d got himself back under control, and said this as calmly as he might have asked whether I planned to serve bacon with the breakfast porridge.

Startled, I looked up at him.

“I’m not.” But my hands had gone by reflex to my belly.

“I’m not,” I repeated more strongly. “I can’t be.” I could, though—just possibly. The chance was a remote one, but it existed. I normally used some form of contraception, just to be certain—but obviously …

“I am not,” I said. “I’d know.”

He merely stared at me, eyebrows raised. I wouldn’t; not so soon. So soon—soon enough that if it were so, and if there were more than one man … there would be doubt. The benefit of the doubt; that’s what he offered me—and himself.

A deep shudder started in the depths of my womb and spread instantly through my body, making goose bumps break out on my skin, despite the warmth of the room.

“Martha,” the man had whispered, the weight of him pressing me into the leaves.

“Bloody, bloody hell,” I said very quietly. I spread my hands out flat on the table, trying to think.

“Martha.” And the stale smell of him, the meaty press of damp bare thighs, rasping with hair—

“No!” My legs and buttocks pressed together so tightly in revulsion that I rose an inch or two on the bench.

“You might—” Jamie began stubbornly.

“I’m not,” I repeated, just as stubbornly. “But even if—you can’t, Jamie.”

He looked at me, and I caught the flicker of fear in his eyes. That, I realized with a jolt, was exactly what he was afraid of. Or one of the things.

“I mean we can’t,” I said quickly. “I’m almost sure that I’m not pregnant—but I’m not at all sure that I haven’t been exposed to some disgusting disease.” That was something else I hadn’t thought of until now, and the goose bumps were back in full force. Pregnancy was unlikely; gonorrhea or syphilis weren’t. “We—we can’t. Not until I’ve had a course of penicillin.”

I was rising from the bench even as I spoke.

“Where are ye going?” he asked, startled.

“The surgery!”

The hallway was dark, and the fire out in my surgery, but that didn’t stop me. I flung open the door of the cupboard, and began groping hastily about. A light fell over my shoulder, illuminating the shimmering row of bottles. Jamie had lit a taper and come after me.

“What in the name of God are ye doing, Sassenach?”

“Penicillin,” I said, seizing one of the bottles and the leather pouch in which I kept my snake-fang syringes.

“Now?”

“Yes, bloody now! Light the candle, will you?”

He did, and the light wavered and grew into a globe of warm yellow, gleaming off the leather tubes of my homemade syringes. I had a good bit of penicillin mixture to hand, luckily. The liquid in the bottle was pink; many of the Penicillium colonies from this batch had been grown in stale wine.

“Are ye sure it will work?” Jamie asked quietly, from the shadows.

“No,” I said, tight-lipped. “But it’s what I have.” The thought of spirochetes, multiplying silently in my bloodstream, second by second, was making my hand shake. I choked down the fear that the penicillin might be defective. It had worked miracles on gross superficial infections. There was no reason why—

“Let me do it, Sassenach.” Jamie took the syringe from my hand; my fingers were slippery and fumbling. His were steady, his face calm in candlelight as he filled the syringe.

“Do me first, then,” he said, handing it back.

“What—you? But you don’t need to—I mean—you hate injections,” I ended feebly.

He snorted briefly and lowered his brows at me.

“Listen, Sassenach. If I mean to fight my own fears, and yours—and I do—then I shallna boggle at pinpricks, aye? Do it!” He turned his side to me and bent over, one elbow braced on the counter, and hitched up the side of his kilt, baring one muscular buttock.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I might have argued further with him, but a glance at him, standing there bare-arsed and stubborn as Black Mountain, decided me of the futility of that. He’d made up his mind, and we were both going to live with the consequences.

Feeling suddenly and oddly calm, I lifted the syringe, squeezing gently to remove any air bubbles.

“Shift your weight, then,” I said, nudging him rudely. “Relax this side; I don’t want to break the needle.”

He drew in his breath with a hiss; the needle was thick, and there was enough alcohol from the wine to make it sting badly, as I discovered when I took my own injection a minute later.

“Ouch! Ow! Oh, Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, gritting my teeth as I withdrew the needle from my thigh. “Christ, that hurts!”

Jamie gave me a lopsided smile, still rubbing his backside.

“Aye, well. The rest of it won’t be worse than this, I expect.”

The rest of it. I felt suddenly hollow, and light-headed with it, as though I hadn’t eaten for a week.

“You—you’re sure?” I asked, putting down the syringe.

“No,” he said. “I’m not.” He took a deep breath then, and looked at me, his face uncertain in the wavering candlelight. “But I mean to try. I must.”

I smoothed the linen night rail down over my punctured thigh, looking at him as I did it. He’d dropped all his masks long since; the doubt, the anger, and the fear were all there, etched plain in the desperate lines of his face. For once, I thought, my own countenance was less easy to read, masked behind its bruises.

Something soft brushed past my leg with a small mirp! and I looked down to see that Adso had brought me a dead vole, no doubt by way of sympathy. I started to smile, felt my lip tingle, and then looked up at Jamie and let it split as I did smile, the taste of blood warm silver on my tongue.

“Well … you’ve come whenever I’ve needed you; I rather think you’ll do it this time, too.”

He looked completely blank for an instant, not grasping the feeble joke. Then it struck him, and blood rushed to his face. His lip twitched, and twitched again, unable to decide between shock and laughter.

I thought he turned his back then to hide his face, but in fact, he had only turned to search the cupboard. He found what he was looking for, and turned round again with a bottle of my best muscat wine in his hand, shining dark. He held it to his body with his elbow, and took down another.

“Aye, I will,” he said, reaching out his free hand to me. “But if ye think either one of us is going to do this sober, Sassenach, ye’re verra much mistaken.”



A GUST OF WIND from the open door roused Roger from uneasy sleep. He had fallen asleep on the settle, his legs trailing on the floor, Jemmy snuggled warmly heavy on his chest.

He looked up, blinking and disoriented, as Brianna stooped to take the little boy from his arms.

“Is it raining out?” he said, catching a whiff of damp and ozone from her cloak. He sat up and rubbed a hand over his face to rouse himself, feeling the scruff of a four-day beard.

“No, but it’s going to.” She laid Jemmy back in his trundle, covered him, and hung up the cloak before coming to Roger. She smelled of the night, and her hand was cold on his flushed cheek. He put his arms round her waist and leaned his head against her, sighing.

He would have been happy to stay that way forever—or at least the next hour or two. She stroked his head gently for a moment, though, then moved away, stooping to light the candle from the hearth.

“You must be starved. Shall I fix you something?”

“No. I mean … yes. Please.” As the last remnants of grogginess fell away, he realized that he was, in fact, starving. After their stop at the stream in the morning, they hadn’t stopped again, Jamie anxious to get home. He couldn’t recall when he’d last eaten, but hadn’t felt any sense of hunger at all until this minute.

He fell on the bread and butter and jam she brought him, ravenous. He ate single-mindedly, and it was several minutes before he thought to ask, swallowing a final thick, buttery, sweet bite, “How’s your mother?”

“Fine,” she said, with an excellent imitation of Claire with her stiffest English upper lip. “Perfectly fine.” She grimaced at him, and he laughed, though quietly, with an automatic glance at the trundle.

“Is she, then?”

Bree raised an eyebrow at him.

“Do you think so?”

“No,” he admitted, sobering. “But I don’t think she’s going to tell you if she’s not. She’ll not want ye worrying.”

She made a rather rude glottal noise in response to this notion, and turned her back on him, lifting the long veil of hair off her neck.

“Will you do my laces?”

“You sound just like your father when ye make that noise—only higher-pitched. Have ye been practicing?” He stood up and pulled the laces loose. Undid her stays as well, then on impulse, slid his hands inside the opened gown, resting them on the warm swell of her hips.

“Every day. Have you?” She leaned back against him, and his hands came up, cupping her breasts by reflex.

“No,” he admitted. “It hurts.” It was Claire’s suggestion—that he try to sing, pitching his voice both higher and lower than normal, in hopes of loosening his vocal cords, perhaps restoring a bit of his original resonance.

“Coward,” she said, but her voice was nearly as soft as the hair that brushed his cheek.

“Aye, I am,” he said as softly. It did hurt, but it wasn’t the physical pain that he minded. It was feeling the echo of his old voice in his bones—the ease and power of it—and then hearing the uncouth noises that emerged with such difficulty now from his throat—croaks and grunts and squeals. Like a pig choking to death on a crow, he thought disparagingly.

“It’s them that are cowards,” Bree said, still speaking softly, but with steel in her voice. She tensed a little in his arms. “Her face—her poor face! How could they? How could anybody do something like that?”

He had a sudden vision of Claire, naked by the pool, silent as the rocks, her breasts streaked with the blood from her newly set nose. He drew back, nearly jerking his hands away.

“What?” Brianna said, startled. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He pulled his hands out of her gown and stepped back. “I—er, is there maybe a bit of milk?”

She looked at him oddly, but went out to the lean-to at the back and brought in a jug of milk. He drank it thirstily, aware of her eyes on him, watchful as a cat’s, as she undressed and changed into her night rail.

She sat down on the bed and began to brush out her hair, preparing to plait it for sleep. On impulse, he reached out and took the brush from her. Without speaking, he ran one hand through the thickness of her hair, lifting it, smoothing it back from her face.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered, and felt tears come to his eyes again.

“So are you.” She lifted her hands to his shoulders and brought him slowly down to his knees before her. She looked searchingly into his eyes—he did his best to look back. She smiled a little, then, and reached to untie the thong that held his own hair back.

It fell around his shoulders in a dusty black tangle, smelling of burned things, stale sweat, and horses. He protested when she took up her hairbrush, but she ignored him, and made him bend his head over her lap, while she picked pine straw and sandburs from his head, slowly working out the snarls. His head bent lower, and lower still, and he found himself at last with his forehead pressed into her lap, breathing in the close scent of her.

He was reminded of medieval paintings, sinners kneeling, heads bowed in confession and remorse. Presbyterians did not confess on their knees—Catholics still did, he thought. In darkness, like this—in anonymity.

“Ye’ve not asked me what happened,” he whispered at last, to the shadows of her thighs. “Did your father tell ye?”

He heard her draw breath, but her voice was calm when she replied.

“No.”

She said no more, and the room was quiet, save for the sound of the brush through his hair, and the rising rush of the wind outside.

How would it be for Jamie? Roger wondered suddenly. Would he really do it? Try to … He shied away from the thought, unable to contemplate it. Seeing instead a picture of Claire, coming out of the dawn, her face a swollen mask. Still herself, but remote as a distant planet on an orbit departing for the outer reaches of deep space—when might it come in sight again? Stooping to touch the dead, at Jamie’s urging, to see for herself the price of her honor.

It wasn’t the possibility of a child, he thought suddenly. It was fear—but not of that. It was Jamie’s fear that he would lose her—that she would go, swing out into a dark and solitary space without him, unless he could somehow bind her to him, keep her with him. But, Christ, what a risk to take—with a woman so shocked and brutalized, how could he risk it?

How could he not?

Brianna laid down the brush, though she kept a hand gently on his head, stroking it. He knew that fear too well himself—remembered the gulf that once had lain between them, and the courage it had taken to leap over it. For both of them.

He was some kind of a coward, maybe—but not that kind.

“Brianna,” he said, and felt the lump in his throat, the scar of the rope. She heard the need in his voice and looked at him as he raised his head, hand lifting toward his face, and he seized it hard, pressing the palm of it against his cheek, rubbing against it.

“Brianna,” he said again.

“What? What is it?” Her voice was soft, not to wake the bairn, but full of urgency.

“Brianna, will ye hear me?”

“You know I will. What is it?” Her body was against him, wanting to tend him, and he desired the comfort of her so badly that he would have lain down there on the rug before the fire and buried his head between her breasts—but not yet.

“Only—listen to what I must say. And then—please God—tell me I have done right.” Tell me that you love me, still, he meant, but could not say it.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she whispered. Her eyes were dark and soft, bottomless with forgiveness not yet earned. And somewhere beyond them, he saw another pair of eyes, staring up at him in drunken bewilderment, changing abruptly into fear as he raised his arm for the killing blow.

“Yes, I do,” he said softly. “Put out the candle, aye?”



NOT THE KITCHEN, still strewn with emotional wreckage. Not the surgery, with all its sharp-edged memories. Jamie hesitated, but then nodded toward the stair, raising one eyebrow. I nodded, and followed him up to our bedroom.

It seemed both familiar and strange, as places do when one is away for a time. Perhaps it was only my injured nose that made it smell strange, too; perhaps I only imagined that I could smell it—cold and somehow stale, though everything was swept and dusted. Jamie poked up the fire and light sprang up, wavering in bright swaths over the wooden walls, the scents of smoke and hot resin helping to fill the sense of emptiness in the room.

Neither of us glanced toward the bed. He lit the candlestick on the washstand, then set our two stools near the window, and opened the shutters to the restless night. He’d brought two pewter cups; he filled these and set them on the broad sill, along with the bottles.

I stood just inside the doorway, watching his preparations, feeling thoroughly peculiar.

I was suffering the oddest contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, I felt as though he were a complete stranger. I could not even imagine, let alone recall, a sense of ease in touching him. His body was no longer the comfortable extension of my own, but something foreign, unapproachable.