I took a deep breath, accepting the implied bargain.
“Tell me,” I said. “How it was.”
Now he did look away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.
“It . . . was tender,” he said quietly, after a moment. “Sad.”
“Sad,” I echoed. “How?”
He didn’t look up but kept his eyes fixed on the flowers, following the movements of a big black bumblebee among the furled blooms.
“Both of us mourning things that were lost,” he said slowly, brows drawn down in thought. “She said she meant to keep ye alive for me, to let me . . . to let me imagine it was you, I suppose she meant.”
“Didn’t work quite that way?”
“No.” He looked up then, straight on, and his eyes went through me like a rapier through a scarecrow. “There couldna be anyone like you.”
It wasn’t said with an air of compliment, more one of flat finality—or, even, of resentment.
I lifted a shoulder briefly. There wasn’t much response I could make.
“And?”
He sighed and looked back at his knotted hands. He was squeezing the fingers of his narrowed right hand with his left, as though to remind himself of the missing finger.
“It was quiet,” he said to his thumb. “We didna talk, really, not once we’d . . . begun.” He closed his eyes, and I wondered, with a small twinge of curiosity, just what he saw. I was surprised to realize that curiosity was all I felt—with, perhaps, pity for them. I’d seen the cave in which they’d made love, a cold granite tomb, and I knew how desperate the state of things had been in the Highlands then. Just the promise of a little human warmth . . . “Both of us mourning things that were lost,” he’d said.
“It was just the once. It didna last very long; I—it had been a long time,” he said, and a faint flush showed across his cheekbones. “But . . . I needed it, verra much. She held me after, and . . . I needed that more. I fell asleep in her arms; she was gone when I woke. But I carried the warmth of her with me. For a long time,” he said very softly.
That gave me a quite unexpected stab of jealousy, and I straightened a little, fighting it back with clenched hands. He sensed it and turned his head toward me. He’d felt that flame ignite—and had one to match it.
“And you?” he said, giving me a hard, direct look.
“It wasn’t tender,” I said with an edge. “And it wasn’t sad. It should have been. When he came into my room and said he wouldn’t mourn you alone, and we talked, then I got up and went to him, expecting—if I had so much as an expectation; I don’t think I had any conscious thoughts. . . .”
“No?” He matched my edge with his own. “Blind drunk, were ye?”
“Yes, I bloody was, and so was he.” I knew what he was thinking; he wasn’t making any effort to hide it, and I had a sudden, vivid recollection of sitting with him in the corner of a tavern in Cross Creek, his taking my face suddenly between his hands and kissing me, and the warm sweetness of wine passing from his mouth to mine. I sprang to my feet and slapped my hand on the bench.
“Yes, I bloody was!” I said again, furious. “I was drunk every damned day since I heard you were dead.”
He drew a deep, deep breath, and I saw his eyes fix on his hands, clenched on his knees. He let it out very slowly.
“And what did he give ye, then?”
“Something to hit,” I said. “At least to begin with.”
He looked up at me, startled.
“Ye hit him?”
“No, I hit you,” I snapped. My fist had curled, without my realization, clenched against my thigh. I remembered that first blow, a blind, frenzied punch into unwary flesh, all the force of my grief behind it. The flex of recoil that took away the sensation of warmth for an instant, brought it back with a smash that flung me onto the dressing table, borne down by a man’s weight, his grip tight on my wrists, and me screaming in fury. I didn’t remember the specifics of what came next—or, rather, I recalled certain things very vividly but had no idea of the order in which they happened.
“It was a blur,” people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.
“Mary MacNab,” I said abruptly. “She gave you . . . tenderness, you said. There should be a word for what this was, what John gave me, but I haven’t thought of it yet.” I needed a word that might convey, encapsulate.
“Violence,” I said. “That was part of it.” Jamie stiffened and gave me a narrow look. I knew what he was thinking and shook my head. “Not that. I was numb—deliberately numb, because I couldn’t bear to feel. He could; he had more courage than I did. And he made me feel it, too. That’s why I hit him.”
I’d been numb, and John had ripped off the dressing of denial, the wrappings of the small daily necessities that kept me upright and functioning; his physical presence had torn away the bandages of grief and showed what lay below: myself, bloody and unhealed.
I felt the air thick in my throat, damp and hot and itching on my skin. And finally I found the word.
“Triage,” I said abruptly. “Under the numbness, I was . . . raw. Bloody. Skinned. You do triage, you . . . stop the bleeding first. You stop it. You stop it, or the patient dies. He stopped it.”
He’d stopped it by slapping his own grief, his own fury, over the welling blood of mine. Two wounds, pressed together, blood still flowing freely—but no longer lost and draining, flowing instead into another body, and the other’s blood into mine, hot, searing, not welcome—but life.