Dragonfly in Amber, Page 64

  He remained motionless for a long moment, eyes closed. Then, with a hissing sigh of resignation, he got laboriously to his feet. With a moody twitch of his shoulder, he summoned Ian and the two of them turned, following Murtagh, who was already out the door. As he passed, Jamie reached down a long arm, hauled Fergus to his feet, and dragged the boy sleepily along.

  “Welcome home,” Jamie said morosely, and with a last wistful glance at fire and whisky, trudged out into the night once more.

  31

  MAIL CALL

  After this inauspicious homecoming, matters rapidly improved. Lallybroch absorbed Jamie at once, as though he had never left, and I found myself pulled effortlessly into the current of farm life as well. It was an unsettled autumn, with frequent rain, but with fair, bright days that made the blood sing, too. The place bustled with life, everyone hurrying through the harvest time and the preparations that must be made for the coming winter.

  Lallybroch was remote, even for a Highland farm. No real roads led there, but the post still reached us by messenger, over the crags and the heather-clad slopes, a connection with the world outside. It was a world that sometimes seemed unreal in memory, as though I had never danced among the mirrors of Versailles. But the letters brought back France, and reading them, I could see the poplar trees along the Rue Tremoulins, or hear the reverberating bong of the cathedral bell that hung above L’Hôpital des Anges.

  Louise’s child was born safely; a son. Her letters, rife with exclamations and underlinings, overflowed with besotted descriptions of the angelic Henri. Of his father, putative or real, there was no mention.

  Charles Stuart’s letter, arriving a month later, made no mention of the child, but according to Jamie, was even more incoherent than usual, seething with vague plans and grandiosities.

  The Earl of Mar wrote soberly and circumspectly, but his general annoyance with Charles was clear. The Bonnie Prince was not behaving. He was rude and overbearing to his most loyal followers, ignored those who might be of help to him, insulted whom he should not, talked wildly, and—reading between the lines—drank to excess. Given the attitude of the times regarding alcoholic intake on the part of gentlemen, I thought Charles’s performance must have been fairly spectacular, to occasion such comment. I supposed the birth of his son had not, in fact, escaped his notice.

  Mother Hildegarde wrote from time to time, brief, informative notes squeezed into a few minutes that could be snatched from her daily schedule. Each letter ended with the same words; “Bouton also sends his regards.”

  Master Raymond did not write, but every so often, a parcel would come addressed to me, unsigned and unmarked, but containing odd things: rare herbs and small, faceted crystals; a collection of stones, each the size of Jamie’s thumbnail, smooth and disc-shaped. Each one had a tiny figure carved into one side, some with lettering above or on the reverse. And then there were the bones—a bear’s digit, with the great curved claw still attached; the complete vertebrae of a small snake, articulated and strung on a leather thong, so the whole string flexed in a lifelike manner; an assortment of teeth, ranging from a string of round, peglike things that Jamie said came from a seal, through the high-crowned, scythe-cusped teeth of deer, to something that looked suspiciously like a human molar.

  From time to time, I carried some of the smooth, carved stones in my pocket, enjoying the feel of them between my fingers. They were old; I knew that much. From Roman times at least; perhaps even earlier. And from the look of some of the creatures on them, whoever had carved them had meant them to be magic. Whether they were like the herbs—having some actual virtue—or only a symbol, like the signs of the Cabbala, I didn’t know. They seemed benign, though, and I kept them.

  While I enjoyed the daily round of domestic tasks, what I liked best were the long walks to the various cottages on the estate. I always carried a large basket with me on these visits, containing an assortment of things, from small treats for the children to the most commonly needed medicines. These were called for frequently, for poverty and poor hygiene made illness common, and there were no physicians north of Fort William or south of Inverness.

  Some ailments I could treat readily, like the bleeding gums and skin eruptions characteristic of mild scurvy. Other things were beyond my power to heal.

  * * *

  I laid a hand on Rabbie MacNab’s head. The shaggy hair was damp at his temples, but his jaw hung open, slack, relaxed, and the pulse in his neck beat slowly.

  “He’s all right now,” I said. His mother could see that as well as I could; he lay sprawled in the peaceful abandon of sleep, cheeks flushed from the heat of the nearby fire. Still, she stayed tense and watchful, hovering over the bedstead until I spoke. Once I had given absolution to the evidence of her own eyes, she was willing to believe, though; her bunched shoulders slumped under her shawl.

  “Thank the Blessed Mother,” Mary MacNab murmured, crossing herself briefly, “and you, my lady.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I protested. This was quite literally true; the only service I had been able to render young Rabbie was to make his mother let him alone. It had, in fact, taken a certain amount of forcefulness to discourage her efforts to feed him bran mixed with cock’s blood, wave burning feathers under his nose, or dash cold water over him—none of these remedies being of marked use to someone suffering an epileptic seizure. When I arrived, his mother had been volubly regretting her inability to administer the most effective of remedies: spring water drunk from the skull of a suicide.

  “It frichts me so when he’s taen like that,” Mary MacNab said, gazing longingly at the bed where her son lay. “I had Father MacMurtry to him the last time, and he prayed a terrible long time, and sprinkled holy water on the lad to drive the de’ils out. But noo they’ve come back.” She clasped her hands tight together, as though she wished to touch her son, but couldn’t bring herself to do so.

  “It isn’t devils,” I said. “It’s only a sickness, and not all that bed a one, at that.”

  “Aye, my lady, an’ ye say so,” she murmured, unwilling to contradict me, but plainly unconvinced.

  “He’ll be all right.” I tried to reassure the woman, without raising hopes that couldn’t be met. “He always recovers from these fits, doesn’t he?” The fits had come on two years ago—probably the result of head injury from beatings administered by his late father, I thought—and while the seizures were infrequent, they were undeniably terrifying to his mother when they occurred.

  She nodded reluctantly, plainly unconvinced.

  “Aye…though he bangs his heid something fearful now and then, thrashin’ as he does.”

  “Yes, that’s a risk,” I said patiently. “If he does it again, just pull him away from anything hard, and let him alone. I know it looks bad, but really, he’ll be quite all right. Just let the fit run its course, and when it’s over, put him to bed and let him sleep.” I knew that words were of limited value, no matter how true they might be. Something more concrete was needed for reassurance.

  As I turned to go, I heard a small click in the deep pocket of my skirt, and had a sudden inspiration. Reaching in, I pulled out two or three of the small smooth charmstones Raymond had sent me. I selected the milky white one—chalcedony, perhaps—with the tiny figure of a writhing man carved into one side. So that’s what it’s for, I thought.

  “Sew this into his pocket,” I said, laying the tiny charm ceremoniously in the woman’s hand. “It will protect him from…from devils.” I cleared my throat. “You needn’t worry about him, then, even if he has another fit; he’ll come out of it all right.”

  I left then, feeling at once extremely foolish and halfway pleased, amidst an eager flood of relieved thanks. I wasn’t sure whether I was becoming a better physician or merely a more practiced charlatan. Still, if I couldn’t do much for Rabbie, I could help his mother—or let her help herself, at least. Healing comes from the healed; not from the physician. That much, Raymond had taught me.

  * *
*

  I left the house then, to do my errands for the day, calling on two of the cottages near the west end of the farm. All was well at the Kirbys and the Weston Frasers, and I was soon on my way back to the house. At the top of a slope, I sat down under a large beech tree to rest for a moment before the long walk back. The sun was coming down the sky, but hadn’t yet reached the row of pines that topped the ridge on the west side of Lallybroch. It was still late afternoon, and the world glowed with the colors of late autumn.

  The fallen beechmast was cool and slippery under me, but a good many leaves still clung, yellowed and curling, to the tree above. I leaned back against the smooth-barked trunk and closed my eyes, dimming the bright glare of ripe barley fields to a dark red glow behind my eyelids.

  The stifling confines of the crofters’ cottages had given me a headache. I leaned my head against the birch’s smooth bark and began to breathe slowly and deeply, letting the fresh outdoor air fill my lungs, beginning what I always thought of as “turning in.”

  This was my own imperfect attempt to duplicate the feeling of the process Master Raymond had shown me in L’Hôpital des Anges; a summoning of the look and feel of each bit of myself, imagining exactly what the various organs and systems looked and felt like when they were functioning properly.

  I sat quietly, hands loose in my lap, and listened to the beat of my heart. Beating fast from the exertion of the climb, it slowed quickly to a resting pace. The autumn breeze lifted the tendrils of hair from my neck and cooled my fire-flushed cheeks.

  I sat, eyes closed, and traced the path of my blood, from the secret, thick-walled chambers of my heart, blue-purple through the pulmonary artery, reddening swiftly as the sacs of the lungs dumped their burden of oxygen. Then out in a bursting surge through the arch of the aorta, and the tumbling race upward and down and out, through carotids, renals, subclavians. To the smallest capillaries, blooming beneath the surface of the skin, I traced the path of my blood through the systems of my body, remembering the feel of perfection, of health. Of peace.

  I sat still, breathing slowly, feeling languorous and heavy as though I had just risen from the act of love. My skin felt thin, my lips slightly swollen, and the pressure of my clothes was like the touch of Jamie’s hands. It was no random choice that had invoked his name to cure me. Whether it was health of mind or body, the love of him was necessary to me as breath or blood. My mind reached out for him, sleeping or waking, and finding him, was satisfied. My body flushed and glowed, and as it came to full life, it hungered for his.

  The headache was gone. I sat a moment longer, breathing. Then I got to my feet and walked down the hill toward home.

  * * *

  I had never actually had a home. Orphaned at five, I had lived the life of a academic vagabond with my uncle Lamb for the next thirteen years. In tents on a dusty plain, in caves in the hills, in the swept and garnished chambers of an empty pyramid, Quentin Lambert Beauchamp, M.S., Ph.D., F.R.A.S., etc., had set up the series of temporary camps in which he did the archaeological work that would make him famous long before a car crash ended his brother’s life and threw me into his. Not one to dither over petty details like an orphaned niece, Uncle Lamb had promptly enrolled me in a boarding school.

  Not one to accept the vagaries of fate without a fight, I declined absolutely to go there. And, recognizing something in me that he had himself in abundant measure, Uncle Lamb had shrugged, and on the decision of a heartbeat, had taken me forever from the world of order and routine, of sums, clean sheets, and daily baths, to follow him into vagabondage.

  The roving life had continued with Frank, though with a shift from field to universities, as the digging of a historian is usually conducted within walls. So, when the war came in 1939, it was less a disruption to me than to most.

  I had moved from our latest hired flat into the junior nurses’ quarters at Pembroke Hospital, and from there to a field station in France, and back again to Pembroke before war’s end. And then, those few brief months with Frank, before we came to Scotland, seeking to find each other again. Only to lose each other once and for all, when I had walked into a stone circle, through madness, and out the other side, into the past that was my present.

  It was strange, then, and rather wonderful, to wake in the upper bedroom at Lallybroch, next to Jamie, and realize, as I watched the dawn touch his sleeping face, that he had been born in this bed. All the sounds of the house, from the creak of the back stair under an early-rising maid’s foot, to the drumming rain on the roofslates, were sounds he had heard a thousand times before; heard so often, he didn’t hear them anymore. I did.

  His mother, Ellen, had planted the late-blooming rosebush by the door. Its faint, rich scent still wafted up the walls of the house to the bedroom window. It was as though she reached in herself, to touch him lightly in passing. To touch me, too, in welcome.

  Beyond the house itself lay Lallybroch; fields and barns and village and crofts. He had fished in the stream that ran down from the hills, climbed the oaks and towering larches, eaten by the hearthstone of every croft. It was his place.

  But he, too, had lived with disruption and change. Arrest, and the flight of outlawry; the rootless life of a mercenary soldier. Arrest again, imprisonment and torture, and the flight into exile so recently ended. But he had lived in one place for his first fourteen years. And even at that age, when he had been sent, as was the custom, to foster for two years with his mother’s brother, Dougal MacKenzie, it was part and parcel of the life expected for a man who would return to live forever on his land, to care for his tenants and estate, to be a part of a larger organism. Permanence was his destiny.

  But there had been that space of absence, and the experience of things beyond the boundaries of Lallybroch, even beyond the rocky coasts of Scotland. Jamie had spoken with kings, had touched law, and commerce, seen adventure and violence and magic. Once the boundaries of home had been transgressed, could destiny be enough to hold him? I wondered.

  As I came down from the crest of the hill, I saw him below, heaving boulders into place as he repaired a rift in a drystone dike that bordered one of the smaller fields. Near him on the ground lay a pair of rabbits, neatly gutted but not yet skinned.

  “ ‘Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill,’ ” I quoted, smiling at him as I came up beside him.

  He grinned back, wiped the sweat from his brow, then pretended to shudder.

  “Dinna mention the sea to me, Sassenach. I saw two wee laddies sailing a bit of wood in the millpond this morning and nearly heaved up my breakfast at the sight.”

  I laughed. “You haven’t any urge to go back to France, then?”

  “God, no. Not even for the brandy.” He heaved one last stone to the top of the wall and settled it into place. “Going back to the house?”

  “Yes. Do you want me to take the rabbits?”

  He shook his head, and bent to pick them up. “No need; I’m going back myself. Ian needs a hand wi’ the new storage cellar for the potatoes.”

  The first potato crop ever planted on Lallybroch was due for harvest within a few days, and—on my timorous and inexpert advice—a small root-cellar was being dug to house them. I had distinctly mixed feelings, whenever I looked at the potato field. On the one hand, I felt considerable pride in the sprawling, leafy vines that covered it. On the other, I felt complete panic at the thought that sixty families might depend on what lay under those vines for sustenance through the winter. It was on my advice—given hastily a year ago—that a prime barley field had been planted in potatoes, a crop hitherto unknown in the Highlands.

  I knew that in the fullness of time, potatoes would become an important staple of life in the Highlands, less susceptible to blight and failure than the crops of oats and barley. Knowing that from a paragraph read in a geography book long ago was a far cry from deliberately taking responsibility for the lives of the people who would eat the crop.

  I wondered if the taking of risks
for other people got easier with practice. Jamie did it routinely, managing the affairs of the estate and the tenants as though he had been born to it. But, of course, hehad been born to it.

  “Is the cellar nearly ready?” I asked.

  “Oh, aye. Ian’s got the doors built, and the pit’s nearly dug. It’s only there’s a soft bit of earth near the back, and his peg gets stuck in when he stands there.” While Ian managed very well on the wooden peg he wore in substitute for his lower right leg, there were the occasional awkwardnesses such as this.

  Jamie glanced thoughtfully up the hill behind us. “We’ll need the cellar finished and covered by tonight; it’s going to rain again before dawn.”

  I turned to look in the direction of his gaze. Nothing showed on the slope but grass and heather, a few trees, and the rocky seams of granite that poked bony ridges through the scruffy overgrowth.

  “How in hell can you tell that?”

  He smiled, pointing uphill with his chin. “See the small oak tree? And the ash nearby?”

  I glanced at the trees, baffled. “Yes. What about them?”