“You . . . found him? Or was it Marsali?”
He shook his head.
“She doesna ken. Or rather, I expect she does, but she’s no admitting it—to either of them.”
“He can’t have been badly wounded, then, or she’d have to know for sure.” My chest still hurt, but the words were coming more easily.
“No. I saw him go past, whilst I was scraping a deer’s hide up on the hill. He didna see me, and I didna call out—I dinna ken what it was that struck me queer about him . . . but something did. I went on wi’ my work for a bit—I didna want to go far from the house, in case—but it niggled at me.” He let go of my hand and rubbed his knuckles underneath his nose.
“I couldna seem to let go of the thought that something was amiss, and finally I put down my work and went after him, thinking myself all kinds of a fool for it.”
Fergus had headed over the end of the Ridge, and down the wooded slope that led to the White Spring. This was the most remote and secluded of the three springs on the Ridge, called “white” because of the large pale boulder that stood near the head of the pool.
Jamie had come down through the trees in time to see Fergus lie down by the spring, sleeve rolled up and coat folded beneath his head, and submerge his handless left arm in the water.
“I should maybe ha’ shouted then,” he said, rubbing a distracted hand through his hair. “But I couldna really believe it, ken?”
Then Fergus had taken a small boning knife in his right hand, reached down into the pool, and neatly opened the veins of his left elbow, blood blooming in a soft, dark cloud around the whiteness of his arm.
“I shouted then,” Jamie said. He closed his eyes, and scrubbed his hands hard over his face, as though trying to erase the memory of it.
He had run down the hill, grabbed Fergus, jerked him to his feet, and hit him.
“You hit him?”
“I did,” he said shortly. “He’s lucky I didna break his neck, the wee bastard.” Color had begun to rise in his face as he talked, and he pressed his lips tight together.
“Was this after the boys took Henri-Christian?” I asked, my memory of the conversation in the stable with Fergus vividly in mind. “I mean—”
“Aye, I ken what ye mean,” he interrupted. “And it was the day after the lads put Henri-Christian in the creek, aye. It wasna only that, though—not only all the trouble over the wee laddie being a dwarf, I mean.” He glanced at me, his face troubled.
“We talked. After I’d bound up his arm and brought him round. He said he’d been thinking of it for some time; the thing wi’ the bairn only pushed him into it.”
“But . . . how could he?” I said, distressed. “To leave Marsali, and the children—how?”
Jamie looked down, hands braced on his knees, and sighed. The window was open, and a soft breeze came in, lifting the hairs on the crown of his head like tiny flames.
“He thought they would do better without him,” he said flatly. “If he was dead, Marsali could wed again—find a man who could care for her and the weans. Provide for them. Protect wee Henri.”
“He thinks—thought—he couldn’t?”
Jamie glanced sharply at me.
“Sassenach,” he said, “he kens damn well he can’t.”
I drew breath to protest this, but bit my lip instead, finding no immediate rebuttal.
Jamie stood up and moved restlessly about the room, picking things up and putting them down.
“Would you do such a thing?” I asked, after a bit. “In the same circumstances, I mean.”
He paused for a moment, his back to me, hand on my hairbrush.
“No,” he said softly. “But it’s a hard thing for a man to live with.”
“Well, I see that . . .” I began, slowly, but he swung round to face me. His own face was strained, filled with a weariness that had little to do with lack of sleep.
“No, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye don’t.” He spoke gently, but with such a tone of despair in his voice that tears came to my eyes.
It was as much sheer physical weakness as emotional distress, but I knew that if I gave way to it, the end would be complete soggy disintegration, and no one needed that just now. I bit my lip hard and wiped my eyes with the edge of the sheet.
I heard the thump as he knelt down beside me, and I reached out blindly for him, pulling his head against my breast. He put his arms round me and sighed deeply, his breath warm on my skin through the linen of my shift. I stroked his hair with one trembling hand, and felt him give way suddenly, all the tension going out of him like water running from a jug.
I had the oddest feeling, then—as though the strength he had clung to had now been let go . . . and was flowing into me. My tenuous grip on my own body firmed as I held his, and my heart ceased wavering, taking up instead its normal solid, tireless beating.
The tears had retreated, though they were precariously near the surface. I traced the lines of his face with my fingers, ruddy bronze and lined with sun and care; the high forehead with its thick auburn brows, and the broad planes of his cheek, the long straight nose, straight as a blade. The closed eyes, slanted and mysterious with those odd lashes of his, blond at the root, so deep an auburn at the tips as to seem almost black.
“Don’t you know?” I said very softly, tracing the small, neat line of his ear. Tiny, stiff blond hairs sprouted in a tiny whorl from the tagus, tickling my finger. “Don’t any of you know? That it’s you. Not what you can give, or do, or provide. Just you.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath, and nodded, though he didn’t open his eyes.
“I know. I said that to him, to Fergus,” he said very softly. “Or at least I think I did. I said a terrible lot of things.”
They had knelt together by the spring, embracing, wet with blood and water, locked together as though he could hold Fergus to the earth, to his family, by force of will alone, and he had no notion at all what he had said, lost in the passion of the moment—until the end.
“You must continue, for their sakes—though you would not for your own,” he had whispered, Fergus’s face pressed into his shoulder, the black hair wet with sweat and water, cold against his cheek. “Tu comprends, mon enfant, mon fils? Comprends-tu?”
I felt his throat move as he swallowed.
“See, I kent ye were dying,” he said very softly. “I was sure ye’d be gone when I came back to the house, and I should be alone. I wasna speaking to Fergus then, I think, so much as to myself.”
He raised his head then, and looked at me through a blur of tears and laughter.
“Oh, God, Claire,” he said, “I would have been so angry, if ye’d died and left me!”
I wanted to laugh or cry, or both, myself—and had I still harbored regrets regarding the loss of eternal peace, I would have surrendered them now without hesitation.
“I didn’t,” I said, and touched his lip. “I won’t. Or at least I’ll try not.” I slid my hand behind his head and drew him back to me. He was a good deal larger and heavier than Henri-Christian, but I felt I could hold him forever, if necessary.
It was early afternoon, and the light just beginning to shift, slanting in through the tops of the west-facing windows so that the room filled with a clean, bright light that glowed on Jamie’s hair and the worn creamy linen of his shirt. I could feel the knobs at the top of his spine, and the yielding flesh in the narrow channel between shoulder blade and backbone.
“Where will you send them?” I asked, and tried to smooth the whorled hair of the cowlick on his crown.
“To Cross Creek, maybe—or to Wilmington,” he replied. His eyes were half-closed, watching the shadows of leaves flicker on the side of the armoire he had built me. “Wherever seems best for the printing trade.”
He shifted a little, tightening his grip on my bu**ocks, then frowned.
“Christ, Sassenach, ye havena got any bum left at all!”
“Well, never mind,” I said with resignation. “I’m sure that will grow back soon enough.”
65
MOMENT OF DECLARATION
JAMIE MET THEM near Woolam’s Mill, five men on horseback. Two were strangers; two were men from Salisbury that he knew—ex-Regulators named Green and Wherry; avid Whigs. The last was Richard Brown, whose face was cold, save for his eyes.
He silently cursed his love of conversation. If not for that, he would have parted from MacDonald as usual, at Coopersville. But they had been talking of poetry—poetry, for God’s sake!—and amusing each other in declamation. Now here he stood in the empty road, holding two horses, while MacDonald, whose guts were in disagreement with him, busied himself deep in the wood.
Amos Green tipped him a nod, and would have passed, but Kitman Wherry reined up; the strangers did likewise, staring curiously.
“Where are Thou bound, friend James?” Wherry, a Quaker, asked pleasantly. “Does Thee come to the meeting at Halifax? For Thee are welcome to ride with us, and that be so.”
Halifax. He felt a trickle of sweat run down the crease of his back. The meeting of the Committee of Correspondence to elect delegates to the Continental Congress.
“I am seeing a friend upon his road,” he replied courteously, with a nod toward MacDonald’s horse. “I will follow, though; perhaps I shall catch ye up along the way.” Fat chance of that, he thought, carefully not looking at Brown.
“I’d not be so sure of your welcome, Mr. Fraser.” Green spoke civilly enough, but with a certain coldness in his manner that made Wherry glance at him in surprise. “Not after what happened in Cross Creek.”
“Oh? And would ye see an innocent man burnt alive, or tarred and feathered?” The last thing he wished was an argument, but something must be said.
One of the strangers spat in the road.
“Not so innocent, if that’s Fogarty Simms you’re speakin’ of. Little Tory pissant,” he added as an afterthought.
“That’s the fellow,” Green said, and spat in agreement. “The committee in Cross Creek set out to teach him a lesson; seems Mr. Fraser here was in disagreement. Quite a scene it was, from what I hear,” he drawled, leaning back a little in his saddle to survey Jamie from his superior height. “Like I said, Mr. Fraser—you ain’t all that popular, right this minute.”
Wherry was frowning, glancing to and fro between Jamie and Green. “To save a man from tar and feathers, no matter what his politics, seems no more than common humanity,” he said sharply.
Brown laughed unpleasantly.
“Might seem so to you, I reckon. Not to other folk. You know a man by the company he keeps. And beyond that, there’s your auntie, eh?” he said, redirecting his speech to Jamie. “And the famous Mrs. MacDonald. I read that speech she gave—in the final edition of Simms’s newspaper,” he added, repeating the unpleasant laugh.
“My aunt’s guests have naught to do wi’ me,” Jamie said, striving for simple matter-of-factness.
“No? How ’bout your aunt’s husband—your uncle, would he be?”