Drums of Autumn, Page 33

  “I gave ye three things that day,” he said softly. “My name, my family, and the protection of my body. You’ll have those things always, Sassenach— so long as we both shall live. No matter where we may be. I willna let ye go hungry or cold; I’ll let nothing harm ye, ever.”

  “I’m not afraid of any of that,” I blurted. “I’m afraid you’ll die, and I can’t stand it if you do, Jamie, I really can’t!”

  He jerked back a little, surprised, and looked down into my face.

  “Well, I’ll do my best to oblige ye, Sassenach,” he said, “but ye ken I may not have all the say in the matter.” His face was serious, but one corner of his mouth curled up irrepressibly.

  The sight did me in utterly.

  “Don’t you laugh!” I said furiously. “Don’t you dare laugh!”

  “Oh, I’m not,” he assured me, trying to straighten his face.

  “You are!” I punched him in the chest. Now he was laughing. I punched him again, harder, and before I knew it, was hammering him in earnest, my fists making small dull thumps against his plaid. He grabbed for my hand, but I ducked my head and bit him on the thumb. He let out a cry and jerked his hand away.

  He examined the toothmarks for a moment, then looked at me, one eyebrow raised. The humor lingered in his eyes, but at least he’d stopped laughing, the bastard.

  “Sassenach, ye’ve seen me damn near dead a dozen times, and not turned a hair. Whyever are ye takin’ on so now, and me not even ill?”

  “Never turned a hair?” I gawked at him in furious amazement. “You think I wasn’t upset?”

  He rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip, eyeing me in some amusement.

  “Oh. Well, I did think ye cared, of course. But I never thought of it in just that way, I admit.”

  “Of course you didn’t! And if you had, it wouldn’t make any difference. You—you—Scot!” It was the worst thing I could think of to call him. Finding no more words, I turned and stomped away.

  Unfortunately, stomping has relatively little effect when executed in bare feet on a grassy meadow. I stepped on something sharp, uttered a small cry, and limped a few more steps before having to stop.

  I had stepped on some sort of cocklebur; half a dozen vicious caltrops were stuck in my bare sole, blood drops welling from the tiny punctures. Precariously balanced on one foot, I tried to pick them out, cursing under my breath.

  I wobbled and nearly fell. A strong hand caught me under the elbow and steadied me. I set my teeth and finished jerking out the spiny burs. I pulled my elbow out of his grasp and turning on my heel, walked—with a good deal more care—back to where I had left my clothing.

  Dropping the cloak on the ground, I proceeded to dress, with what dignity was possible. Jamie stood, arms folded, watching me without comment.

  “When God threw Adam out of Paradise, at least Eve went with him,” I said, talking to my fingers as I fastened the drawstring of my trousers.

  “Aye, that’s true,” he agreed, after a cautious pause. He gave me a sidelong glance, to see whether I was about to hit him again.

  “Ah—ye havena been eating any o’ the plants ye picked this morning, have ye, Sassenach? No, I didna think so,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “I only wondered. Myers says some things here give ye the nightmare something fierce.”

  “I am not having nightmares,” I said, with more force than strictly necessary had I been telling the truth. I was having waking nightmares, though ingestion of hallucinogenic plant substances had nothing to do with it.

  He sighed.

  “D’ye mean to tell me straight out what ye’re talkin’ about, Sassenach, or do ye mean me to suffer a bit first?”

  I glared at him, caught as usual between the urge to laugh and the urge to hit him with a blunt object. Then a wave of despair overcame both laughter and anger. My shoulders slumped in surrender.

  “I’m talking about you,” I said.

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because you’re a bloody Highlander, and you’re all about honor and courage and constancy, and I know you can’t help it, and I wouldn’t want you to, only—only damn it, it’s going to take you to Scotland and get you killed, and there’s nothing I can do about it!”

  He gave me a look of incredulity.

  “Scotland?” he said, as though I’d said something completely mad.

  “Scotland! Where your bloody grave is!”

  He rubbed a hand slowly through his hair, looking down the bridge of his nose at me.

  “Oh,” he said at last. “I see, then. Ye think if I go to Scotland, I must die there, since that’s where I’ll be buried. Is that it?”

  I nodded, too upset to speak.

  “Mmphm. And just why is it ye think I’m going to Scotland?” he asked carefully.

  I glared at him in exasperation, and waved an arm at the expanse of wilderness around us.

  “Where the hell else are you going to get settlers for this land? Of course you’re going to Scotland!”

  He looked at me, exasperated in turn.

  “How in the name of God d’ye think I should do that, Sassenach? I might have, when I had the gems, but now? I’ve maybe ten pound to my name, and that’s borrowed. Shall I fly to Scotland like a bird, then? And lead folk back behind me, walkin’ on the water?”

  “You’ll think of something,” I said miserably. “You always do.”

  He gave me a queer look, then looked away and paused for several moments before answering.

  “I hadna realized ye thought I was God Almighty, Sassenach,” he said at last.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Moses, maybe.” The words were facetious, but neither one of us was joking.

  He walked away a bit, hands clasped behind his back.

  “Watch out for the burs,” I called after him, seeing him heading for the location of my recent mishap. He altered his path in response, but said nothing. He walked to and fro across the clearing, head bent in thought. At last he came back, to stand in front of me.

  “I canna do it alone,” he said quietly. “You’re right about that. But I dinna think I need go to Scotland for my settlers.”

  “What else?”

  “My men—the men who were wi’ me in Ardsmuir,” he said. “They’re here already.”

  “But you haven’t any idea where they are,” I protested. “And besides, they were transported years ago! They’ll be settled; they won’t want to pull up stakes and come to the ends of the bloody earth with you!”

  He smiled, a little wryly.

  “You did, Sassenach.”

  I took a deep breath. The nagging weight of fear that had burdened my heart for the last weeks had eased. With that concern lifted, though, there was now room in my mind to contemplate the staggering difficulty of the task he was setting himself. Track down men scattered over three colonies, persuade them to come with him, and simultaneously find sufficient capital to finance the clearing of land and planting of crops. To say nothing of the sheer enormity of labor involved in carving some small foothold out of this virgin wilderness.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said, smiling slightly as he watched doubts and uncertainties flit across my face. “I always do, aye?”

  All of my breath went out in a long sigh.

  “You do,” I said. “Jamie—are you sure? Your aunt Jocasta—”

  He dismissed that possibility with a flick of his hand.

  “No,” he said. “Never.”

  I still hesitated, feeling guilty.

  “You wouldn’t—it’s not just because of me? What I said about keeping slaves?”

  “No,” he said. He paused, and I saw the two twisted fingers of his right hand twitch. He saw it, too, and stopped the movement abruptly.

  “I have lived as a slave, Claire,” he said quietly, head bent. “And I couldna live, knowing there was a man on earth who felt toward me as I have felt toward those who thought they owned me.”

  I reached out and covered his crippled hand with my o
wn. Tears ran down my cheeks, warm and soothing as summer rain.

  “You won’t leave me?” I asked at last. “You won’t die?”

  He shook his head, and squeezed my hand tight.

  “You are my courage, as I am your conscience,” he whispered. “You are my heart—and I your compassion. We are neither of us whole, alone. Do ye not know that, Sassenach?”

  “I do know that,” I said, and my voice shook. “That’s why I’m so afraid. I don’t want to be half a person again, I can’t bear it.”

  He thumbed a lock of hair off my wet cheek, and pulled me into his arms, so close that I could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He was so solid, so alive, ruddy hair curling gold against bare skin. And yet I had held him so before—and lost him.

  His hand touched my cheek, warm despite the dampness of my skin.

  “But do ye not see how verra small a thing is the notion of death, between us two, Claire?” he whispered.

  My hands curled into fists against his chest. No, I didn’t think it a small thing at all.

  “All the time after ye left me, after Culloden—I was dead then, was I not?”

  “I thought you were. That’s why I—oh.” I took a deep, tremulous breath, and he nodded.

  “Two hundred years from now, I shall most certainly be dead, Sassenach,” he said. He smiled crookedly. “Be it Indians, wild beasts, a plague, the hangman’s rope, or only the blessing of auld age—I will be dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “And while ye were there—in your own time—I was dead, no?”

  I nodded, wordless. Even now, I could look back and see the abyss of despair into which that parting had dropped me, and from which I had climbed, one painful inch at a time.

  Now I stood with him again upon the summit of life, and could not contemplate descent. He reached down and plucked a stalk of grass, spreading the soft green beards between his fingers.

  “ ‘Man is like the grass of the field,’ ” he quoted softly, brushing the slender stem over my knuckles, where they rested against his chest. “ ‘Today it blooms; tomorrow it withers and is cast into the oven.’ ”

  He lifted the silky green tuft to his lips and kissed it, then touched it gently to my mouth.

  “I was dead, my Sassenach—and yet all that time, I loved you.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling the tickle of the grass on my lips, light as the touch of sun and air.

  “I loved you, too,” I whispered. “I always will.”

  The grass fell away. Eyes still closed, I felt him lean toward me, and his mouth on mine, warm as sun, light as air.

  “So long as my body lives, and yours—we are one flesh,” he whispered. His fingers touched me, hair and chin and neck and breast, and I breathed his breath and felt him solid under my hand. Then I lay with my head on his shoulder, the strength of him supporting me, the words deep and soft in his chest.

  “And when my body shall cease, my soul will still be yours. Claire—I swear by my hope of heaven, I will not be parted from you.”

  The wind stirred the leaves of the chestnut trees nearby, and the scents of late summer rose up rich around us; pine and grass and strawberries, sunwarmed stone and cool water, and the sharp, musky smell of his body next to mine.

  “Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed.”

  “That’s the first law of thermodynamics,” I said, wiping my nose.

  “No,” he said. “That’s faith.”

  PART SIX

  Je T’Aime

  17

  HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

  Inverness, Scotland, December 23, 1969

  He checked the train schedule for the dozenth time, then prowled around the manse’s living room, too restless to settle. An hour yet to wait.

  The room was half dismantled, with piles of cartons lying higgledy-piggledy on every surface. He’d promised to have the place cleared out by the New Year, except for the pieces Fiona wanted to keep.

  He wandered down the hall and into the kitchen, stood staring into the ancient refrigerator for a moment, decided he wasn’t hungry and closed the door.

  He wished that Mrs. Graham and the Reverend could have met Brianna, and she them. He smiled at the empty kitchen table, remembering an adolescent conversation with the two elderly people, when he, in the grip of a mad—and unrequited—lust for the tobacconist’s daughter, had asked how to know if one was truly in love.

  “If ye have to ask yourself if you’re in love, laddie—then ye aren’t,” Mrs. Graham had assured him, tapping her spoon on the edge of her mixing bowl for emphasis. “And keep your paws off wee Mavis MacDowell, or her Da will murder ye.”

  “When you’re in love, Rog, you’ll know it with no telling,” the Reverend had chimed in, dipping a finger in the cake batter. He ducked in mock alarm as Mrs. Graham raised a threatening spoon, and laughed. “And do mind yourself with young Mavis, lad; I’m not old enough to be a grandfather.”

  Well, they’d been right. He knew, with no telling—had known since he’d met Brianna Randall. What he didn’t know for sure was whether Brianna felt the same.

  He couldn’t wait any longer. He slapped his pocket to be sure of his keys, ran down the stairs and out into the winter rain that had begun to pelt down just after breakfast. They did say a cold shower was the thing. Hadn’t worked with Mavis, though.

  December 24, 1969

  “Now, the plum pudding’s in the warming oven, and the hard sauce in the wee pan to the back,” Fiona instructed him, pulling on her fuzzy woolen hat. It was red, Fiona was short, and in it she looked like a garden gnome.

  “Don’t turn up the flame too high, mind. And dinna turn it out altogether, either, or you’ll never get it lit again. And here, I’ve the directions for the birds for tomorrow all written out, they’re stuffed in their pan, and I’ve left the veg already chopped to go along in the big yellow bowl in the fridge, and…” She fumbled in the pocket of her jeans and withdrew a handwritten slip of paper, which she thrust into his hand.

  He patted her on the head.

  “Don’t worry, Fiona,” he assured her. “We won’t burn the place down. Nor starve, either.”

  She frowned dubiously, hesitating at the door. Her fiancé, sitting in his car outside, revved his engine in an impatient sort of way.

  “Aye, well. You’re sure the two of ye won’t come with us? Ernie’s Mam wouldna mind it a bit, and I’m sure she’d not think it right, just the two of ye left here by yourselves to keep Christmas…”

  “Don’t worry, Fiona,” he said, edging her gently backward out the door. “We’ll manage fine. You have a nice holiday with Ernie, and don’t bother about us.”

  She sighed, giving in reluctantly. “Aye, I suppose you’ll do.” A short, irritable beep! from behind made her turn and glare at the car.

  “Well, I’m coming then, aren’t I?” she demanded. Turning back, she beamed suddenly at Roger, threw her arms about him, and standing on tiptoe, kissed him firmly on the lips.

  She drew back and winked conspiratorially, screwing up her small, round face. “That’ll sort our Ernie out,” she whispered. “Happy Christmas, Rog!” she said loudly, and with a gay wave, hopped off the porch and strolled in leisurely fashion toward the car, hips swinging just a bit.

  Its engine roaring in protest, the car shot off with a squeal of tires before the door had quite shut behind Fiona. Roger stood on the porch waving, pleased that Ernie wasn’t an especially massive bloke.

  The door opened behind him and Brianna poked her head out.

  “What are you doing out here with no coat on?” she inquired. “It’s freezing!”

  He hesitated, tempted to tell her. After all, it had evidently worked on Ernie. But it was Christmas Eve, he reminded himself. In spite of the lowering sky and plummeting temperature, he felt warm and tingling all over. He smiled at her.

  “Just seeing Fiona off,” he said, pulling back the door. “Shall we see if we can make lunch without blowing up the kitchen?”
r />   * * *

  They managed sandwiches without incident, and returned after lunch to the study. The room was nearly empty now; only a few shelves of books remained to be sorted and packed.

  On the one hand, Roger felt immense relief that the job was nearly done. On the other, it was sad to see the warm, cluttered study reduced to such a shell of its former self.

  The Reverend’s big desk had been emptied and removed to the garage for storage, the floor-to-ceiling shelves denuded of their huge burden of books, the cork-lined wall stripped of its many layers of fluttering papers. This process reminded Roger uncomfortably of chicken-plucking, the result being a stark and pathetic bareness that made him want to avert his eyes.

  There was one square of paper still pinned to the cork. He’d take that down last.

  “What about these?” Brianna waved a feather duster inquiringly at a small stack of books that sat on the table before her. An array of boxes gaped on the floor at her feet, half filled with books destined for various fates: libraries, antiquarian societies, friends of the Reverend’s, Roger’s personal use.

  “They’re autographed, but not inscribed to anybody,” she said, handing him the top one. “You’ve got the set he inscribed to your father, but do you want these, too? They’re first editions.”

  Roger turned the book over in his hands. It was one of Frank Randall’s, a lovely book, beautifully typeset and bound to match the elegance of its scholarly content.

  “You should have them, shouldn’t you?” he said. Without waiting for an answer, he set the book gently into a small box that rested on the seat of an armchair. “Your dad’s work, after all.”

  “I’ve got some,” she protested. “Tons. Boxes and boxes.”

  “Not autographed, though?”

  “Well, no.” She picked up another of the books and flipped it open to the flyleaf, where Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis—F. W. Randall was written in a strong, slanting hand. She rubbed a finger gently over the signature, and her wide mouth softened.

  “The times are changing, and we with them. You’re sure you don’t want them, Roger?”

  “Sure,” he said, and smiled. He waved a wry hand at their book-strewn surroundings. “Don’t worry, you won’t leave me short.”

  She laughed and put the books in her own box, then went back to her work, dusting and wiping the stacked and sorted books before packing them. Most hadn’t been cleaned in forty years, and she was liberally smudged herself by this time, long fingers grimy and the cuffs of her white shirt nearly black with filth.

  “Won’t you miss this place?” she asked. She wiped a strand of hair out of her eyes and gestured at the spacious room. “You grew up here, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, and yes,” he answered, heaving another full carton onto the pile to be shipped to the university library. “Not much choice, though.”

  “I guess you couldn’t live here,” she agreed regretfully. “Since you have to be in Oxford most of the time. But do you have to sell it?”

  “I can’t sell it. It’s not mine.” He stooped to get a grip on an extra-large carton, and rose slowly to his feet, grunting with effort. He staggered across the room and dropped it onto the stack, with a thud that raised small puffs of dust from the boxes beneath it.

  “Whew!” He blew out his breath, grinning at her. “God help the antiquarians