“Highland drovers sometimes drain a cup or two of blood from one of their beasts, and mix it with oatmeal to eat on the road,” I said. “Nutritious, I suppose, but less tasty.”
Roger nodded, abstracted. He had set down the nearly empty basin and was cleaning dried blood from under his nails with the point of his dirk.
“Is it the same as the one for deer?” he asked. “The prayer. I’ve seen Jamie say that one, though I didn’t catch all of the words.”
“The gralloch prayer? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
Roger worked industriously on a thumbnail, eyes fixed on his hand.
“I wasn’t sure if he thought it right for me to know it. Me not being a Catholic, I mean.”
I looked down into the mixture, hiding a smile.
“I don’t think it would make a difference. That particular prayer is a lot older than the Church of Rome, if I’m not mistaken.”
A flicker of interest lit Roger’s face, the buried scholar coming to the surface.
“I did think the Gaelic was a very old form—even older than what you hear these days—I mean . . . now.” He flushed a little, realizing what he had said. I nodded, but didn’t say anything.
I remembered what it was like, that feeling that one was living in an elaborate make-believe. The feeling that reality existed in another time, another place. I remembered, and with a small shock, realized that it was now only memory—for me, time had shifted, as though my illness had pushed me through some final barrier.
Now was my time, reality the scrape of wood and slick of grease beneath my fingers, the arc of the sun that set the rhythm of my days, the nearness of Jamie. It was the other world, of cars and ringing telephones, of alarm clocks and mortgages, that seemed unreal and remote, the stuff of dreams.
Neither Roger nor Bree had made that transition, though. I could see it in the way they behaved, hear it in the echoes of their private conversations. Likely it was because they had each other; they could keep the other time alive, a small shared world between them. For me, the change was easier. I had lived here before, had come this time on purpose, after all—and I had Jamie. No matter what I told him of the future, he could never see it as other than a fairy tale. Our small shared world was built of different things.
I worried now and then about Bree and Roger, though. It was dangerous to treat the past as they sometimes did—as picturesque or curious, a temporary condition that could be escaped. There was no escape for them—whether it was love or duty, Jemmy held them both, a small redheaded anchor to the present. Better—or safer, at least—if they could wholly accept this time as theirs.
“The Indians have it, too,” I said to Roger. “The gralloch prayer, or something like it. That’s why I said I thought it older than the Church.”
He nodded, interested.
“I think that kind of thing is common to all primitive cultures—anyplace where men kill to eat.”
Primitive cultures. I caught my lower lip between my teeth, forbearing to point out that primitive or not, if his family were to survive, he personally would very likely be obliged to kill for them. But then I caught sight of his hand, idly rubbing at the dried blood between his fingers. He knew that already. “Yes, I did,” he’d said, when I’d told him he need not.
He looked up then, caught my eye, and gave me a faint, tired smile. He understood.
“I think maybe . . . it’s that killing without ceremony seems like murder,” he said slowly. “If you have the ceremony—some sort of ritual that acknowledges your necessity . . .”
“Necessity—and also sacrifice.” Jamie’s voice came softly from behind me, startling me. I turned my head sharply. He was standing in the shadow of the big red spruce; I wondered how long he’d been there.
“Didn’t hear you come out,” I said, turning up my face to be kissed as he came to me. “Has the Major gone?”
“No,” he said, and kissed my brow, one of the few clean spots left. “I’ve left him wi’ Sinclair for a bit. He’s exercised about the Committee of Safety, aye?” He grimaced, then turned to Roger.
“Aye, ye’ve the right of it,” he said. “Killing’s never a pleasant business, but it’s needful. If ye must spill blood, though, it’s right to take it wi’ thanks.”
Roger nodded, glancing at the mixture I was working, up to my elbows in spilled blood.
“Ye’ll tell me the proper words for the next time, then?”
“Not too late for this time, is it?” I said. Both men looked slightly startled. I raised an eyebrow at Jamie, then Roger. “I did say it wasn’t for the pig.”
Jamie’s eyes met mine with a glint of humor, but he nodded gravely.
“Well enough.”
At my direction, he took up the heavy jar of spices: the ground mixture of mace and marjoram, sage and pepper, parsley and thyme. Roger held out his hands, cupped, and Jamie poured them full. Then Roger rubbed the herbs slowly between his palms, showering the dusty, greenish crumbs into the barrel, their pungent scent mingling with the smell of the blood, as Jamie spoke the words slowly, in an ancient tongue come down from the days of the Norsemen.
“Say it in English,” I said, seeing from Roger’s face that while he spoke the words, he did not recognize them all.
“O Lord, bless the blood and the flesh of this the creature that You gave me,” Jamie said softly. He scooped a pinch of the herbs himself, and rubbed them between thumb and forefinger, in a rain of fragrant dust.
“Created by Your hand as You created man,
Life given for life.
That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift,
That me and mine may give thanks for Your own sacrifice of blood and flesh,
Life given for life.”
The last crumbs of green and gray disappeared into the mixture under my hands, and the ritual of the sausage was complete.
“THAT WAS GOOD OF YE, Sassenach,” Jamie said, drying my clean, wet hands and arms with the towel afterward. He nodded toward the corner of the house, where Roger had disappeared to help with the rest of the butchering, looking somewhat more peaceful. “I did think to tell him before, but I couldna see how to do it.”
I smiled and moved close to him. It was a cold, windy day, and now that I had stopped working, the chill drove me closer to seek his warmth. He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt both the reassuring heat of his embrace, and the soft crackle of paper inside his shirt.
“What’s that?”
“Oh, a bittie letter Sinclair’s brought,” he said, drawing back a bit to reach into his shirt. “I didna want to open it while Donald was there, and didna trust him not to be reading it when I went out.”
“It’s not your letter, anyway,” I said, taking the smudged wad of paper from him. “It’s mine.”
“Oh, is it? Sinclair didna say, just handed it to me.”
“He would!” Not unusually, Ronnie Sinclair viewed me—all women, for that matter—as simply a minor appendage of a husband. I rather pitied the woman he might eventually induce to marry him.
I unfolded the note with some difficulty; it had been worn so long next to sweaty skin that the edges had frayed and stuck together.
The message inside was brief and cryptic, but unsettling. It had been scratched into the paper with something like a sharpened stick, using an ink that looked disturbingly like dried blood, though it was more likely berry juice.
“What does it say, Sassenach?” Seeing me frowning at the paper, Jamie moved to the side to look. I held it out to him.
Far down, in one corner, scratched in faint and tiny letters, as though the sender had hoped by this means to escape notice, was the word “Faydree.” Above, in bolder scratchings, the message read
YU
CUM
“IT MUST BE HER,” I said, shivering as I drew my shawl closer. It was cold in the surgery, despite the small brazier glowing in the corner, but Ronnie Sinclair and MacDonald were in the kitchen, drinking cider and waiting while the sausages boiled. I spread the note open on my surgery table, its minatory summons dark and peremptory above the timid signature. “Look. Who else could it be?”
“She canna write, surely?” Jamie objected. “Though I suppose it might be that someone wrote it for her,” he amended, frowning.
“No, she could have written this, I think.” Brianna and Roger had come into the surgery, too; Bree reached out and touched the ragged paper, one long finger gently tracing the staggered letters. “I taught her.”
“You did?” Jamie looked surprised. “When?”
“When I stayed at River Run. When you and Mama went to find Roger.” Her wide mouth pressed thin for a moment; it wasn’t an occasion she wished much to remember.
“I taught her the alphabet; I meant to teach her to read and write. We did all the letters—she knew how they sounded, and she could draw them. But then one day she said she couldn’t anymore, and she wouldn’t sit down with me.” She glanced up, a troubled frown between her thick, red brows. “I thought maybe Aunt Jocasta found out, and stopped her.”
“More likely Ulysses. Jocasta would have stopped you, lass.” Jamie’s frown matched hers as he glanced at me. “Ye do think it’s Phaedre, then? My aunt’s body slave?”
I shook my head, and bit one corner of my lip in doubt.
“The slaves at River Run do say her name like that—Faydree. And I certainly don’t know anyone else by that name.”
Jamie had questioned Ronnie Sinclair—casually, to give no occasion for alarm or gossip—but the cooper knew no more than he had told me: the note had been handed to him by a tinker, with the simple direction that it was “for the healer.”
I leaned over the table, lifting a candle high to look at the note once more. The “F” of the signature had been made with a hesitant, repeated stroke—more than one try before the writer had committed herself to signing it. The more evidence, I thought, of its origin. I didn’t know whether it was against the law in North Carolina to teach a slave to read or write, but it was certainly discouraged. While there were marked exceptions—slaves educated to their owners’ ends, like Ulysses himself—it was on the whole a dangerous skill, and one a slave would go some way to conceal.
“She wouldn’t have risked sending word like this, unless it was a serious matter,” Roger said. He stood behind Bree, one hand on her shoulder, looking down at the note she held flattened on the table. “But what?”
“Have you heard from your aunt lately?” I asked Jamie, but I knew the answer before he shook his head. Any word from River Run that reached the Ridge would have been a matter of public knowledge within hours.
We had not gone to the Gathering at Mt. Helicon this year; there was too much to do on the Ridge and Jamie wished to avoid the heated politics involved. Still, Jocasta and Duncan had meant to be there. Anything wrong would surely have been a matter of general gossip, which would have reached us long since.