“The schoolmasters made me learn to write wi’ my right hand,” he remarked, “but luckily it didna occur to anyone to force me to abuse myself that way, too.”
“Why call it that?” I asked, laughing. “Abusing yourself, I mean.”
“Well, ‘masturbate’ sounds a great deal more wicked, aye? And if ye’re abusing yourself, it sounds less like ye’re havin’ a good time.”
“Strong, durable, long-enduring,” I quoted, stroking the object in question lightly. “Perhaps Alasdair meant something like glove leather?”
“Vigorous and powerful it may be, Sassenach, and certainly joyous—but I tell ye, it’s no going to rise to the occasion three times in one night. Not at my age.” Detaching my hand, he rolled over, scooping me into a spoon shape before him, and in less than a minute was sound asleep.
When I woke in the morning, he was gone.
VISIT TO A HAUNTED GARDEN
I BLOODY KNEW. From the moment I woke to birdsong and a cold quilt beside me, I knew. Jamie often rose before dawn, for hunting, fishing, or travel—but he invariably touched me before he left, leaving me with a word or a kiss. We’d lived long enough to know how chancy life could be and how swiftly people could be parted forever. We’d never spoken of it or made a formal custom of it, but we almost never parted without some brief token of affection.
And now he’d gone off in the dark, without a word.
“You bloody, bloody man!” I said, and thumped the ground with my fist in frustration.
I made my way down the hill, quilts folded under my arm, fuming. Jenny. He’d gone and talked to Jenny. Of course he had; why hadn’t I foreseen that?
He’d agreed not to ask me. He hadn’t said he wouldn’t ask anyone else. And while Jenny clearly loved me, I’d never been under any illusions as to where her ultimate loyalty lay. She wouldn’t have voluntarily given up my secret, but if her brother asked her, point-blank, she would certainly have told him.
The sun was spreading warmth like honey over the morning, but none of it was reaching my cold bones.
He knew. And he’d gone a-hunting.
I DIDN’T NEED to look but looked anyway. Jamie’s rifle was gone from its place behind the door.
“He came in early,” Amy Higgins told me, spooning out a bowl of parritch for me. “We were all in bed still, but he called out soft, and Bobby got up to unbar the door. I would have fed him, but he said he was well enough and away he went. Hunting, he said.”
“Of course,” I said. The bowl was warm to my hands, and in spite of what I thought—what I knew—was going on, the thick grainy smell of it was enticing. And there was honey, and a little cream kept back from the butter-making; Amy allowed these in deference to Bobby’s debauched English tastes, though she stuck to the usual virtuously Scottish salt on parritch herself.
Eating settled me, a little. The blunt fact was that there was absolutely nothing I could do. I didn’t know the lumpkin’s name or where he lived. Jamie might. If he’d talked to Jenny right away, he could easily have sent word to Beardsley’s trading post and asked who was the fat man with the port-wine stain on his face. Even if he didn’t yet know and was on his way to find out, I had no means of catching up with him—let alone stopping him.
“A Hieland man canna live wi’ a man who’s raped his wife nearby, nor should he.” That’s what Jenny had said to me. In warning, I now realized.
“Gak!” It was wee Rob, toddling round the room, who had seized my skirt in both hands and was giving me a toothy smile—all four teeth of it. “Hungy!”
“Hallo, there,” I said, smiling back despite my disquiet. “Hungry, you say?” I extended a small spoonful of honeyed parritch in his direction, and he went for it like a starving piranha. We shared the rest of the bowl in companionable silence—Rob wasn’t a chatty child—and I decided that I would work in the garden today. I didn’t want to go far afield, as Rachel could go into labor at any moment, from the looks of it. And a short spell of solitude amid the soothing company of the vegetable kingdom might lend me a bit of much-needed calm.
It would also get me out of the cabin, I reflected, as Rob, having licked the bowl, handed it back to me, toddled across the cabin, and, lifting his dress, peed in the hearth.
THERE WOULD BE a new kitchen garden near the new house. It was measured and planned, the earth broken, and poles for the deer fence had begun accumulating. But there was little point in walking that far each day to tend a garden when there was not yet a house to live in. I minded Amy’s plot in the meantime, sneaking occasional seedlings and propagules into it between the cabbages and turnips—but today I meant to visit the Old Garden.
That’s what the people of the Ridge called it, and they didn’t go there. I privately called it Malva’s Garden, and did.
It was on a small rise behind where the Big House had stood. With the new house rising already in my mind, I passed the bare spot where the Big House had been, without a qualm. There were more exigent things to be qualm about, I thought, and sniggered.
“You are losing your mind, Beauchamp,” I murmured, but felt better.
The deer fence had weathered and broken down in spots, and the deer had naturally accepted the invitation. Most of the bulbs had been pawed up and eaten, and while a few of the softer plants, like lettuce and radishes, had escaped long enough to reseed themselves, the growing plants had been nibbled to scabby white stalks. But a very thorny wild rose brier flourished away in one corner, cucumber vines crawled over the ground, and a massive gourd vine rippled over a collapsed portion of the fence, thick with infant fruits.