Dragonfly in Amber, Page 68

  “So when we left the next morning,” he went on, “I waited ’til we’d come to a spot where ye can sit and look over the valley below. And then”—he swallowed, and his hand tightened slightly on mine—“I told him. About Randall. And everything that happened.”

  I began to understand the ambiguity of the look Ian had given Jamie. And I now understood the look of strain on Jamie’s face, and the smudges under his eyes. Not knowing what to say, I just squeezed his hands.

  “I hadna thought I’d ever tell anyone—anyone but you,” he added, returning the squeeze. He smiled briefly, then pulled one hand away to rub his face.

  “But Ian…well, he’s…” He groped for the right word. “He knows me, d’ye see?”

  “I think so. You’ve known him all your life, haven’t you?”

  He nodded, looking sightlessly out the window. The swirling snow had begun to fall again, small flakes dancing against the pane, whiter than the sky.

  “He’s only a year older than me. When I was growing, he was always there. Until I was fourteen, there wasna a day went by when I didna see Ian. And even later, after I’d gone to foster wi’ Dougal, and to Leoch, and then later still to Paris, to university—when I’d come back, I’d walk round a corner and there he would be, and it would be like I’d never left. He’d just smile when he saw me, like he always did, and then we’d be walkin’ away together, side by side, ower the fields and the streams, talkin’ of everything.” He sighed deeply, and rubbed a hand through his hair.

  “Ian…he’s the part of me that belongs here, that never left,” he said, struggling to explain. “I thought…I must tell him; I didna want to feel…apart. From Ian. From here.” He gestured toward the window, then turned toward me, eyes dark in the dim light. “D’ye see why?”

  “I think so,” I said again, softly. “Did Ian?”

  He made that small, uncomfortable shrugging motion, as though easing a shirt too tight across his back. “Well, I couldna tell. At first, when I began to tell him, he just kept shaking his head, as though he couldna believe me, and then when he did—” He paused and licked his lips, and I had some idea of just how much that confession in the snow had cost him. “I could see he wanted to jump to his feet and stamp back and forth, but he couldn’t, because of his leg. His fists were knotted up, and his face was white, and he kept saying ‘How? Damn ye, Jamie, how could ye let him do it?’ ”

  He shook his head. “I dinna remember what I said. Or what he said. We shouted at each other, I know that much. And I wanted to hit him, but I couldn’t, because of his leg. And he wanted to hit me, but couldn’t—because of his leg.” He gave a brief snort of laughter. “Christ, we must ha’ looked a rare pair of fools, wavin’ our arms and shouting at each other. But I shouted longer, and finally he shut up and listened to the end of it.

  “Then all of a sudden, I couldna go on talking; it just seemed like no use. And I sat down all at once on a rock, and put my head in my hands. Then after a time, Ian said we’d best be going on. And I nodded, and got up, and helped him on his horse, and we started off again, not speakin’ to each other.”

  Jamie seemed suddenly to realize how tightly he was holding my hand. He released his grip, but continued to hold my hand, turning my wedding ring between his thumb and forefinger.

  “We rode for a long time,” he said softly. “And then I heard a small sound behind me, and reined up so Ian’s horse came alongside, and I could see he’d been weeping—still was, wi’ the tears streaming down his face. And he saw me look at him, and shook his head hard, as if he was still angry, but then he held out his hand to me. I took it, and he gave me a squeeze, hard enough to break the bones. Then he let go, and we came on home.”

  I could feel the tension go out of him, with the ending of the story. “Be well, brother,” Ian had said, balanced on his one leg in the bedroom door.

  “It’s all right, then?” I asked.

  “It will be.” He relaxed completely now, sinking back into the goose-down pillows. I slid down under the quilts beside him, and lay close, fitted against his side. We watched the snow fall, hissing softly against the glass.

  “I’m glad you’re safe home,” I said.

  * * *

  I woke to the same gray light in the morning. Jamie, already dressed for the day, was standing by the window.

  “Oh, you’re awake, Sassenach?” he said, seeing me lift my head from the pillow. “That’s good. I brought ye a present.”

  He reached into his sporran and pulled out several copper doits, two or three small rocks, a short stick wrapped with fishline, a crumpled letter, and a tangle of hair ribbons.

  “Hair ribbons?” I said. “Thank you; they’re lovely.”

  “No, those aren’t for you,” he said, frowning as he disentanged the blue strands from the mole’s foot he carried as a charm against rheumatism. “They’re for wee Maggie.” He squinted dubiously at the rocks remaining in his palm. To my astonishment, he picked one up and licked it.

  “No, not that one,” he muttered, and dived back into his sporran.

  “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” I inquired with interest, watching this performance. He didn’t answer, but came out with another handful of rocks, which he sniffed at, discarding them one by one until he came to a nodule that struck his fancy. This one he licked once, for certainty, then dropped it into my hand, beaming.

  “Amber,” he said, with satisfaction, as I turned the irregular lump over with a forefinger. It seemed warm to the touch, and I closed my hand over it, almost unconsciously.

  “It needs polishing, of course,” he explained. “But I thought it would make ye a bonny necklace.” He flushed slightly, watching me. “It’s…it’s a gift for our first year of marriage. When I saw it, I was minded of the bit of amber Hugh Munro gave ye, when we wed.”

  “I still have that,” I said softly, caressing the odd little lump of petrified tree sap. Hugh’s chunk of amber, one side sheared off and polished into a small window, had a dragonfly embedded in the matrix, suspended in eternal flight. I kept it in my medicine box, the most powerful of my charms.

  A gift for our first anniversary. We had married in June, of course, not in December. But on the date of our first anniversary, Jamie had been in the Bastille, and I…I had been in the arms of the King of France. No time for a celebration of wedded bliss, that.

  “It’s nearly Hogmanay,” Jamie said, looking out the window at the soft snowfall that blanketed the fields of Lallybroch. “It seems a good time for beginnings, I thought.”

  “I think so, too.” I got out of bed and came to him at the window, putting my arms around his waist. We stayed locked together, not speaking, until my eye suddenly fell on the other small, yellowish lumps that Jamie had removed from his sporran.

  “What on earth are those things, Jamie?” I asked, letting go of him long enough to point.

  “Och, those? They’re honey balls, Sassenach.” He picked up one of the objects, dusting at it with his fingers. “Mrs. Gibson in the village gave them to me. Verra good, though they got a bit dusty in my sporran, I’m afraid.” He held out his open hand to me, smiling. “Want one?”

  34

  THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

  I didn’t know what—or how much—Ian had told Jenny of his conversation in the snow with Jamie. She behaved toward her brother just as always, matter-of-fact and acerbic, with a slight touch of affectionate teasing. I had known her long enough, though, to realize that one of Jenny’s greatest gifts was her ability to see something with utter clarity—and then to look straight through it, as though it wasn’t there.

  The dynamics of feeling and behavior shifted among the four of us during the months, and settled into a pattern of solid strength, based on friendship and founded in work. Mutual respect and trust were simply a necessity; there was so much to be done.

  As Jenny’s pregnancy progressed, I took on more and more of the domestic duties, and she deferred to me more often. I would never try
to usurp her place; she had been the axis of the household since the death of her mother, and it was to her that the servants or tenants most frequently came. Still, they grew used to me, treating me with a friendly respect which bordered sometimes on acceptance, and sometimes on awe.

  The spring was marked first by the planting of an enormous crop of potatoes; over half the available land was given to the new crop—a decision justified within weeks by a hailstorm that flattened the new-sprung barley. The potato vines, creeping low and stolid over the ground, survived.

  The second event of the spring was the birth of a second daughter, Katherine Mary, to Jenny and Ian. She arrived with a suddenness that startled everyone, including Jenny. One day Jenny complained of an aching back and went to lie down. Very shortly it became clear what was really happening, and Jamie went posthaste for Mrs. Martins, the midwife. The two of them arrived back just in time to share in a celebratory glass of wine as the thin, high squalls of the new arrival echoed through the halls of the house.

  And so the year burgeoned and greened, and I bloomed, the last of my hurts healing in the heart of love and work.

  Letters arrived irregularly; sometimes there would be mail once a week, sometimes nothing would come for a month or more. Considering the lengths to which messengers had to go to deliver mail in the Highlands, I thought it incredible that anything ever arrived.

  Today, though, there was a large packet of letters and books, wrapped against the weather in a sheet of oiled parchment, tied with twine. Sending the postal messenger to the kitchen for refreshment, Jenny untied the string carefully and thriftily stowed it in her pocket. She thumbed through the small pile of letters, putting aside for the moment an enticing-looking package addressed from Paris.

  “A letter for Ian—that’ll be the bill for the seed, I expect, and one from Auntie Jocasta—oh, good, we’ve not heard from her in months, I thought she might be ill, but I see her hand is firm on the pen—”

  A letter addressed with bold black strokes fell onto Jenny’s pile, followed by a note from one of Jocasta’s married daughters. Then another for Ian from Edinburgh, one for Jamie from Jared—I recognized the spidery, half-legible writing—and another, a thick, creamy sheet, sealed with the Royal crest of the House of Stuart. Another of Charles’s complaints about the rigors of life in Paris, and the pains of intermittently requited love, I imagined. At least this one looked short; usually he went on for several pages, unburdening his soul to “cher James,” in a misspelled quadrilingual patois that at least made it clear he sought no secretarial help for his personal letters.

  “Ooh, three French novels and a book of poetry from Paris!” Jenny said in excitement, opening the paper-wrapped package. “C’est un embarras de richesse, hm? Which shall we read tonight?” She lifted the small stack of books from their wrappings, stroking the soft leather cover of the top one with a forefinger that trembled with delight. Jenny loved books with the same passion her brother reserved for horses. The manor boasted a small library, in fact, and if the evening leisure between work and bed was short, still it usually included at least a few minutes’ reading.

  “It gives ye something to think on as ye go about your work,” Jenny explained, when I found her one night swaying with weariness, and urged her to go to bed, rather than stay up to read aloud to Ian, Jamie, and myself. She yawned, fist to her mouth. “Even if I’m sae tired I hardly see the words on the page, they’ll come back to me next day, churning or spinning or waulkin’ wool, and I can turn them over in my mind.”

  I hid a smile at the mention of wool waulking. Alone among the Highland farms, I was sure, the women of Lallybroch waulked their wool not only to the old traditional chants but also to the rhythms of Molière and Piron.

  I had a sudden memory of the waulking shed, where the women sat in two facing rows, barefooted and bare-armed in their oldest clothes, bracing themselves against the walls as they thrust with their feet against the long, sodden worm of woolen cloth, battering it into the tight, felted weave that would repel Highland mists and even light rain, keeping the wearer safe from the chill.

  Every so often one woman would rise and go outside, to fetch the kettle of steaming urine from the fire. Skirts kilted high, she would walk spraddle-legged down the center of the shed, drenching the cloth between her legs, and the hot fumes rose fresh and suffocating from the soaking wool, while the waulkers pulled back their feet from random splashes, and made crude jokes.

  “Hot piss sets the dye fast,” one of the women had explained to me as I blinked, eyes watering, on my first entrance to the shed. The other women had watched at first, to see if I would shrink back from the work, but wool-waulking was no great shock, after the things I had seen and done in France, both in the war of 1944 and the hospital of 1744. Time makes very little difference to the basic realities of life. And smell aside, the waulking shed was a warm, cozy place, where the women of Lallybroch visited and joked between bolts of cloth, and sang together in the working, hands moving rhythmically across a table, or bare feet sinking deep into the steaming fabric as we sat on the floor, thrusting against a partner thrusting back.

  I was pulled back from my memories of wool-waulking by the noise of heavy boots in the hallway, and a gust of cool, rainy air as the door opened. Jamie, and Ian with him, talking together in Gaelic, in the comfortable, unemphatic manner that meant they were discussing farm matters.

  “That field’s going to need draining next year,” Jamie was saying as he came past the door. Jenny, seeing them, had put down the mail and gone to fetch fresh linen towels from the chest in the hallway.

  “Dry yourselves before ye come drip on the rug,” she ordered, handing one to each of the men. “And tak’ off your filthy boots, too. The post’s come, Ian—there’s a letter for ye from that man in Perth, the one ye wrote to about the seed potatoes.”

  “Oh, aye? I’ll come read it, then, but is there aught to eat while I do it?” Ian asked, rubbing his wet head with the towel until the thick brown hair stood up in spikes. “I’m famished, and I can hear Jamie’s belly garbeling from here.”

  Jamie shook himself like a wet dog, making his sister emit a small screech as the cold drops flew about the hall. His shirt was pasted to his shoulders and loose strands of rain-soaked hair hung in his eyes, the color of rusted iron.

  I draped a towel around his neck. “Finish drying off, and I’ll go fetch you something.”

  I was in the kitchen when I heard him cry out. I had never heard such a sound from him before. Shock and horror were in it, and something else—a note of finality, like the cry of a man who finds himself seized in a tiger’s jaws. I was down the hall and running for the drawing room without conscious thought, a tray of oatcakes still clutched in my hands.

  When I burst through the door, I saw him standing by the table where Jenny had laid the mail. His face was dead white, and he swayed slightly where he stood, like a tree cut through, waiting for someone to shout “Timber” before falling.

  “What?” I said, scared to death by the look on his face. “Jamie, what? What is it?!”

  With a visible effort, he picked up one of the letters on the table and handed it to me.

  I set down the oatcakes and took the sheet of paper, scanning it rapidly. It was from Jared; I recognized the thin, scrawly handwriting at once. “ ‘Dear Nephew,’ ” I read to myself, “ ‘…so pleased…words cannot express my admiration…your boldness and courage will be an inspiration…cannot fail of success…my prayers shall be with you…’ ” I looked up from the paper, bewildered. “What on earth is he talking about? What have you done, Jamie?”

  The skin was stretched tight across the bones of his face, and he grinned, mirthless as a death’s-head, as he picked up another sheet of paper, this one a cheaply printed handbill.

  “It’s not what I’ve done, Sassenach,” he said. The broadsheet was headed by the crest of the Royal House of Stuart. The message beneath was brief, couched in stately language.

  It stated
that by the ordination of Almighty God, King James, VIII of Scotland and III of England and Ireland asserted herewith his just rights to claim the throne of three kingdoms. And herewith acknowledged the support of these divine rights by the chieftains of the Highland clans, the Jacobite lords, and “various other such loyal subjects of His Majesty, King James, as have subscribed their names upon this Bill of Association in token thereof.”

  My fingers grew icy as I read, and I was conscious of a feeling of terror so acute that it was a real effort to keep on breathing. My ears rang with pounding blood, and there were dark spots before my eyes.

  At the bottom of the sheet were signed the names of the Scottish chieftains who had declared their loyalty to the world, and staked their lives and reputations on the success of Charles Stuart. Clanranald was there, and Glengarry. Stewart of Appin, Alexander MacDonald of Keppoch, Angus MacDonald of Scotus.

  And at the bottom of the list was written, “James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser, of Broch Tuarach.”

  “Jesus bloody fucking Christ,” I whispered, wishing there were something stronger I could say, as a form of relief. “The filthy bastard’s signed your name to it!”