“As to putting things right,” he said, “I canna say—though I mean to try.” His eyes moved over me—stark naked, slightly salt-encrusted, and noticeably grimy about the feet and ankles. He smiled. “Shall we make a start, Sassenach?”
“You’re so tired you can barely stand up,” I protested. “Um—with certain exceptions,” I added, glancing down. It was true; there were dark hollows under his eyes, and while the lines of his body were still long and graceful, they were also eloquent of deep fatigue. I felt as though I’d been run over by a steamroller myself, and I hadn’t been up all night burning down forts.
“Well, seeing as we’ve a bed to hand, I didna plan to stand up for it,” he replied. “Mind, I may never get back on my feet again, but I think I might be able to stay awake for the next ten minutes or so, at least. Ye can pinch me if I fall asleep,” he suggested, smiling.
I rolled my eyes at him, but didn’t argue. I lay down upon the grubby but now-cool sheets, and with a small tremor in the pit of my stomach, opened my legs for him.
We made love like people underwater, heavy-limbed and slow. Mute, able to speak only through crude pantomime. We had barely touched one another in this way since Malva’s death—and the thought of her was still with us.
And not only her. For a time, I tried to focus only on Jamie, fixing my attention on the small intimacies of his body, so well known—the tiny white cicatrice of the triangular scar at his throat, the whorls of auburn hair and the sunburned skin beneath—but I was so tired that my mind refused to cooperate, and persisted in showing me instead random bits of memory or, even more disturbing, imagination.
“It’s no good,” I said. My eyes were shut tight, and I was clinging to the bedclothes with both hands, sheets knotted in my fingers. “I can’t.”
He made a small sound of surprise, but at once rolled away, leaving me damp and trembling.
“What is it, a nighean?” he said softly. He didn’t touch me, but lay close.
“I don’t know,” I said, close to panic. “I keep seeing—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Jamie. I see other people; it’s like I’m making love to other m-men.”
“Oh, aye?” He sounded cautious, but not upset. There was a whish of fabric, and he drew the sheet up over me. That helped a little, but not much. My heart was pounding hard in my chest, I felt dizzy and couldn’t seem to take a full breath; my throat kept closing.
Bolus hystericus, I thought, quite calmly. Do stop, Beauchamp. Easier said than done, but I did stop worrying that I was having a heart attack.
“Ah . . .” Jamie’s voice was cautious. “Who? Hodgepile and—”
“No!” My stomach clenched in revulsion at the thought. I swallowed. “No, I—I hadn’t even thought of that.”
He lay quietly beside me, breathing. I felt as though I were literally coming apart.
“Who is it that ye see, Claire?” he whispered. “Can ye tell me?”
“Frank,” I said, fast, before I could change my mind. “And Tom. And—and Malva.” My chest heaved, and I felt that I would never have air enough to breathe again.
“I could—all of a sudden, I could feel them all,” I blurted. “Touching me. Wanting to come in.” I rolled over, burying my face in the pillow, as though I could seal out everything.
Jamie was silent for a long time. Had I hurt him? I was sorry that I’d told him—but I had no defenses anymore. I could not lie, even for the best of reasons; there was simply no place to go, nowhere to hide. I felt beset by whispering ghosts, their loss, their need, their desperate love pulling me apart. Apart from Jamie, apart from myself.
My entire body was clenched and rigid, trying to keep from dissolution, and my face was pushed so deep into the pillow, trying to escape, that I felt I might suffocate, and was obliged to turn my head, gasping for breath.
“Claire.” Jamie’s voice was soft, but I felt his breath on my face and my eyes popped open. His eyes were soft, too, shadowed with sorrow. Very slowly, he lifted a hand and touched my lips.
“Tom,” I blurted. “I feel as though he’s already dead, because of me, and it’s so terrible. I can’t bear it, Jamie, I really can’t!”
“I know.” He moved his hand, hesitated. “Can ye bear it if I touch ye?”
“I don’t know.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Try it and see.”
That made him smile, though I’d spoken with complete seriousness. He put his hand gently on my shoulder and turned me, then gathered me against him, moving slowly, so that I might pull back. I didn’t.
I sank into him, and clung to him as though he was a floating spar, the only thing keeping me from drowning. He was.
He held me close and stroked my hair for a long time.
“Can ye weep for them, mo nighean donn?” he whispered into my hair at last. “Let them come in.”
The mere idea made me go rigid with panic again. “I can’t.”
“Weep for them,” he whispered, and his voice opened me deeper than his cock. “Ye canna hold a ghost at bay.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid,” I said, but I was already shaking with grief, tears wet on my face. “I can’t!”
And yet I did. Gave up the struggle and opened myself, to memory and sorrow. Sobbed as though my heart would break—and let it break, for them, and all I could not save.
“Let them come, and grieve them, Claire,” he whispered. “And when they’ve gone, I’ll take ye home.”
99
OLD MASTER
River Run
IT HAD RAINED HARD THE NIGHT BEFORE, and while the sun had come out bright and hot, the ground was soggy and steam seemed to rise from it, adding to the thickness of the air. Brianna had put her hair up, to keep it off her neck, but wisps escaped constantly, clinging damply to forehead and cheeks, always in her eyes. She wiped a strand away crossly with the back of her hand; her fingers were smeared with the pigment she was grinding—and the humidity wasn’t doing that any good, making the powder clump and cling to the sides of the mortar.
She needed it, though; she had a new commission, due to start this afternoon.
Jem was hanging round, too, bored and poking his fingers into everything. He was singing to himself, half under his breath; she paid no attention, until she happened to catch a few words.
“What did you say?” she asked, rounding on him incredulously. He couldn’t have been singing “Folsom Prison Blues”—could he?
He blinked at her, lowered his chin to his chest, and said—in the deepest voice he could produce—“Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”
She narrowly stopped herself laughing out loud, feeling her cheeks go pink with the effort of containment.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well. There was only one place he could have gotten it, and her heart rose up at the thought.
“Daddy,” he said logically.
“Has Daddy been singing?” she asked, trying to sound casual. He had to have been. And, just as obviously, had to have been trying Claire’s advice, to shift the register of his voice so as to loosen his frozen vocal cords.
“Uh-huh. Daddy sings a lot. He teached me the song about Sunday morning, and the one about Tom Dooley, and . . . and lots,” he ended, rather at a loss.
“Did he? Well, that’s—put that down!” she said, as he idly picked up an open pouch of rose madder.
“Oops.” He looked guiltily at the blob of paint that had erupted from the leather pouch and landed on his shirt, then at her, and made a tentative move toward the door.
“Oops, he says,” she said darkly. “Don’t you move!” Snaking out a hand, she grabbed him by the collar and applied a turpentine-soaked rag vigorously to the front of his shirt, succeeding only in producing a large pink blotch rather than a vivid red line.
Jem was silent during this ordeal, head bobbing as she pulled him to and fro, swabbing.
“What are you doing in here, anyway?” she demanded crossly. “Didn’t I tell you to go find something to do?” There was no shortage of things to do at River Run, after all.
He hung his head and muttered something, in which she made out the word “scared.”
“Scared? Of what?” A little more gently, she pulled the shirt off over his head.
“The ghost.”
“What ghost?” she asked warily, not sure yet how to handle this. She was aware that all of the slaves at River Run believed implicitly in ghosts, simply as a fact of life. So did virtually all of the Scottish settlers in Cross Creek, Campbelton, and the Ridge. And the Germans from Salem and Bethania. So, for that matter, did her own father.
She could not simply inform Jem that there was no such thing as a ghost—particularly as she was not entirely convinced of that herself.
“Maighistear àrsaidh’s ghost,” he said, looking up at her for the first time, his dark blue eyes troubled. “Josh says he’s been walkin’.”
Something skittered down her back like a centipede. Maighistear àrsaidh was Old Master—Hector Cameron. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the window. They were in the small room above the stable block where she did the messier bits of paint preparation, and Hector Cameron’s white marble mausoleum was clearly visible from here, gleaming like a tooth at the side of the lawn below.
“What makes Josh say that, I wonder?” she said, stalling for time. Her first impulse was to observe that ghosts didn’t walk in broad daylight—but the obvious corollary to that was that they did walk by night, and the last thing she wanted to do was give Jem nightmares.
“He says Angelina saw him, night before last. A big ol’ ghost,” he said, stretching up, hands clawed, and widening his eyes in obvious imitation of Josh’s account.
“Yeah? What was he doing?” She kept her tone light, only mildly interested, and it seemed to be working; Jem was more interested than scared, for the moment.
“Walkin’,” Jem said with a small shrug. What else did ghosts do, after all?
“Was he smoking a pipe?” She’d caught sight of a tall gentleman strolling under the trees on the lawn below, and had an idea.
Jem looked somewhat taken aback at the notion of a pipe-smoking ghost.
“I dunno,” he said dubiously. “Do ghosts smoke pipes?”
“I sort of doubt it,” she said. “But Mr. Buchanan does. See him down there on the lawn?” She moved aside, gesturing toward the window with her chin, and Jem rose up on his toes to look out over the sill. Mr. Buchanan, an acquaintance of Duncan’s who was staying at the house, was in fact smoking a pipe at this very moment; the faint aroma of his tobacco reached them through the open window.
“I think probably Angelina saw Mr. Buchanan walking around in the dark,” she said. “Maybe he was in his nightshirt, going out to the necessary, and she just saw the white and thought he was a ghost.”
Jem giggled at the thought. He seemed willing to be reassured, but hunched his skinny shoulders, peering closely at Mr. Buchanan.