Outlander #2 - Page 95

I rolled to the side and lifted myself to watch him, to see the light touch the bold shape of his face, innocent in sleep, to see the dawning sun touch his hair with flame—for the last time.

A wave of anguish broke through me, so acute that I must have made some sound, for he opened his eyes. He smiled when he saw me, and his eyes searched my face. I knew that he was memorizing my features, as I was his.

"Jamie," I said. My voice was hoa.r.s.e with sleep and swallowed tears. "Jamie. I want you to mark me."

"What?" he said, startled.

The tiny sgian dhu he carried in his stocking was lying within reach, its handle of carved staghorn dark against the piled clothing. I reached for it and handed it to him.

"Cut me," I said urgently. "Deep enough to leave a scar. I want to take away your touch with me, to have something of you that will stay with me always. I don't care if it hurts; nothing could hurt more than leaving you. At least when I touch it, wherever I am, I can feel your touch on me."

His hand was over mine where it rested on the knife's hilt. After a moment, he squeezed it and nodded. He hesitated for a moment, the razor-sharp blade in his hand, and I offered him my right hand. It was warm beneath our coverings, but his breath came in wisps, visible in the cold air of the room.

He turned my palm upward, examining it carefully, then raised it to his lips. A soft kiss in the well of the palm, then he seized the base of my thumb in a hard, sucking bite. Letting go, he swiftly cut into the numbed flesh. I felt no more than a mild burning sensation, but the blood welled at once. He brought the hand quickly to his mouth again, holding it there until the flow of blood slowed. He bound the wound, now stinging, carefully in a handkerchief, but not before I saw that the cut was in the shape of a small, slightly crooked letter "J."

I looked up to see that he was holding out the tiny knife to me. I took it, and somewhat hesitantly, took the hand he offered me.

He closed his eyes briefly, and set his lips, but a small grunt of pain escaped him as I pressed the tip of the knife into the fleshy pad at the base of his thumb. The Mount of Venus, a palm-reader had told me; indicator of pa.s.sion and love.

It was only as I completed the small semicircular cut that I realized he had given me his left hand.

"I should have taken the other," I said. "Your sword hilt will press on it."

He smiled faintly.

"I could ask no more than to feel your touch on me in my last fight—wherever it comes."

Unwrapping the blood-spotted handkerchief, I pressed my wounded hand tightly against his, fingers gripped together. The blood was warm and slick, not yet sticky between our hands.

"Blood of my Blood…" I whispered.

"…and Bone of my Bone," he answered softly. Neither of us could finish the vow, "so long as we both shall live," but the unspoken words hung aching between us. Finally he smiled crookedly.

"Longer than that," he said firmly, and pulled me to him once more.

"Frank," he said at last, with a sigh. "Well, I leave it to you what ye shall tell him about me. Likely he'll not want to hear. But if he does, if ye find ye can talk to him of me, as you have to me of him—then tell him…I'm grateful. Tell him I trust him, because I must. And tell him—" His hands tightened suddenly on my arms, and he spoke with a mixture of laughter and absolute sincerity. "Tell him I hate him to his guts and the marrow of his bones!"

We were dressed, and the dawn light had strengthened into day. There was no food, nothing with which to break our fast. Nothing left that must be done…and nothing left to say.

He would have to leave now, to make it to Drumossie Moor in time. This was our final parting, and we could find no way to say goodbye.

At last, he smiled crookedly, bent, and kissed me gently on the lips.

"They say…" he began, and stopped to clear his throat. "They say, in the old days, when a man would go forth to do a great deed—he would find a wisewoman, and ask her to bless him. He would stand looking forth, in the direction he would go, and she would come behind him, to say the words of the prayer over him. When she had finished, he would walk straight out, and not look back, for that was ill-luck to his quest."

He touched my face once, and turned away, facing the open door. The morning sun streamed in, lighting his hair in a thousand flames. He straightened his shoulders, broad beneath his plaid, and drew a deep breath.

"Bless me, then, wisewoman," he said softly, "and go."

I laid a hand on his shoulder, groping for words. Jenny had taught me a few of the ancient Celtic prayers of protection; I tried to summon the words in my mind.

"Jesus, Thou Son of Mary," I started, speaking hoa.r.s.ely, "I call upon Thy name; and on the name of John the Apostle beloved, And on the names of all the saints in the red domain, To shield thee in the battle to come…"

I stopped, interrupted by a sound from the hillside below. The sound of voices, and of footsteps.

Jamie froze for a second, shoulder hard beneath my hand, then whirled, pushing me toward the rear of the cottage, where the wall had fallen away.

"That way!" he said. "They are English! Claire, go!"

I ran toward the opening in the wall, heart in my throat, as he turned back to the doorway, hand on his sword. I stopped, just for a moment, for the last sight of him. He turned his head, caught sight of me, and suddenly he was with me, pushing me hard against the wall in an agony of desperation. He gripped me fiercely to him. I could feel his erection pressing into my stomach and the hilt of his dagger dug into my side.

He spoke hoa.r.s.ely into my hair. "Once more. I must! But quick!" He pushed me against the wall and I scrabbled up my skirts as he raised his kilts. This was not lovemaking; he took me quickly and powerfully and it was over in seconds. The voices were nearer; only a hundred yards away.

He kissed me once more, hard enough to leave the taste of blood in my mouth. "Name him Brian," he said, "for my father." With a push, he sent me toward the opening. As I ran for it, I glanced back to see him standing in the middle of the doorway, sword half-drawn, dirk ready in his right hand.

The English, unaware that the cottage was occupied, had not thought to send a scout round the back. The slope behind the cottage was deserted as I dashed across it and into the thicket of alders below the hillcrest.

I pushed my way through the brush and the branches, stumbling over rocks, blinded by tears. Behind me I could hear shouts and the clash of steel from the cottage. My thighs were slick and wet with Jamie's seed. The crest of the hill seemed never to grow nearer; surely I would spend the rest of my life fighting my way through the strangling trees!

There was a crashing in the brush behind me. Someone had seen me rush from the cottage. I dashed aside the tears and scrabbled upward, groping on all fours as the ground grew steeper. I was in the clear s.p.a.ce now, the shelf of granite I remembered. The small dogwood growing out of the cliff was there, and the tumble of small boulders.

I stopped at the edge of the stone circle, looking down, trying desperately to see what was happening. How many soldiers had come to the cottage? Could Jamie break free of them and reach his hobbled horse below? Without it, he would never reach Culloden in time.

All at once, the brush below me parted with a flash of red. An English soldier. I turned, ran gasping across the turf of the circle, and hurled myself through the cleft in the rock.

PART SEVEN

Hindsight

47

LOOSE ENDS

He was right, of course. b.l.o.o.d.y man, he was almost always right." Claire sounded half-cross as she spoke. A rueful smile crossed her face, then she looked at Brianna, who sat on the hearthrug, gripping her knees, her face completely blank. Only the faint stir of her hair, lifting and moving in the rising heat of the fire, showed any motion at all.

"It was a dangerous pregnancy—again—and a hazardous birth. Had I risked it there, it would almost certainly have killed us both." She spoke directly to her daughter, as though they were alone in the room. Roger, waking slowly from the spell of the past, felt like an intruder.

"The truth, then, all of it. I couldn't bear to leave him," Claire said softly. "Even for you…I hated you for a bit, before you were born, because it was for you that he'd made me go. I didn't mind dying—not with him. But to have to go on, to live without him—he was right, I had the worst of the bargain. But I kept it, because I loved him. And we lived, you and I, because he loved you."

Brianna didn't move; didn't take her eyes from her mother's face. Only her lips moved, stiffly, as though unaccustomed to talking.

"How long…did you hate me?"

Gold eyes met blue ones, innocent and ruthless as the eyes of a falcon.

"Until you were born. When I held you and nursed you and saw you look up at me with your father's eyes."

Brianna made a faint, strangled sound, but her mother went on, voice softening a little as she looked at the girl at her feet.

"And then I began to know you, something separate from myself or from Jamie. And I loved you for yourself, and not only for the man who fathered you."

There was a blur of motion on the hearthrug, and Brianna shot erect. Her hair bristled out like a lion's mane, and the blue eyes blazed like the heart of the flames behind her.

"Frank Randall was my father!" she said. "He was! I know it!" Fists clenched, she glared at her mother. Her voice trembled with rage.

"I don't know why you're doing this. Maybe you did hate me, maybe you still do!" Tears were beginning to make their way down her cheeks, unbidden, and she dashed them angrily away with the back of one hand.

"Daddy…Daddy loved me—he couldn't have, if I weren't his! Why are you trying to make me believe he wasn't my father? Were you jealous of me? Is that it? Did you mind so much that he loved me? He didn't love you, I know that!" The blue eyes narrowed, cat-like, blazing in a face gone dead-white.

Roger felt a strong desire to ease behind the door before she noticed his presence and turned that molten wrath on him. But beyond his own discomfort he was conscious of a sense of growing awe. The girl that stood on the hearthrug, hissing and spitting in defense of her paternity, flamed with the wild strength that had brought the Highland warriors down on their enemies like shrieking banshees. Her long, straight nose lengthened still further by the shadows, eyes slitted like a snarling cat's, she was the image of her father—and her father was patently not the dark, quiet scholar whose photo adorned the jacket of the book on the table.

Claire opened her mouth once, but then closed it again, watching her daughter with absorbed fascination. That powerful tension of the body, the flexing arch of the broad, flat cheekbones; Roger thought that she had seen that many times before—but not in Brianna.

With a suddenness that made them both flinch, Brianna spun on her heel, grabbed the yellowed news-clippings from the desk, and thrust them into the fire. She s.n.a.t.c.hed the poker and jabbed it viciously into the tindery ma.s.s, heedless of the shower of sparks that flew from the hearth and hissed about her booted feet.

Whirling from the rapidly blackening ma.s.s of glowing paper, she stamped one foot on the hearth.

"b.i.t.c.h!" she shouted at her mother. "You hated me? Well, I hate you!" She drew back the arm with the poker, and Roger's muscles tensed instinctively, ready to lunge for her. But she turned, arm drawn back like a javelin thrower, and hurled the poker through the full-length window, where the panes of night-dark gla.s.s reflected the image of a burning woman for one last instant before the crash and shiver into empty black.

The silence in the study was shattering. Roger, who had leaped to his feet in pursuit of Brianna, was left standing in the middle of the room, awkwardly frozen. He looked down at his hands as if not quite sure what to do with them, then at Claire. She sat perfectly still in the sanctuary of the wing chair, like an animal frozen by the pa.s.sing shadow of a raptor.

After several moments, Roger moved across to the desk and leaned against it.

"I don't know what to say," he said.

Claire's mouth twitched faintly. "Neither do I."

They sat in silence for several minutes. The old house creaked, settling around them, and a faint noise of banging pots came down the hallway from the kitchen, where Fiona was doing something about dinner. Roger's feeling of shock and constrained embarra.s.sment gradually gave way to something else, he wasn't sure what. His hands felt icy, and he rubbed them on his legs, feeling the warm rasp of the corduroy on his palms.

"I…" He started to speak, then stopped and shook his head.

Claire drew a deep breath, and he realized that it was the first movement he had seen her make since Brianna had left. Her gaze was clear and direct.

"Do you believe me?" she asked.

Roger looked thoughtfully at her. "I'll be d.a.m.ned if I know," he said at last.

That provoked a slightly wavering smile. "That's what Jamie said," she said, "when I asked him at the first where he thought I'd come from."

"I can't say I blame him." Roger hesitated, then, making up his mind, got off the desk and came across the room to her. "May I?" He knelt and took her unresisting hand in his, turning it to the light. You can tell real ivory from the synthetic, he remembered suddenly, because the real kind feels warm to the touch. The palm of her hand was a soft pink, but the faint line of the "J" at the base of her thumb was white as bone.

"It doesn't prove anything," she said, watching his face. "It could have been an accident; I could have done it myself."

"But you didn't, did you?" He laid the hand back in her lap very gently, as though it were a fragile artifact.

"No. But I can't prove it. The pearls"—her hand went to the shimmer of the necklace at her throat—"they're authentic; that can be verified. But can I prove where I got them? No."

"And the portrait of Ellen MacKenzie—" he began.

"The same. A coincidence. Something to base my delusion upon. My lies." There was a faintly bitter note in her voice, though she spoke calmly enough. There was a patch of color in each cheek now, and she was losing that utter stillness. It was like watching a statue come to life, he thought.

Roger got to his feet. He paced slowly back and forth, rubbing a hand through his hair.

"But it's important to you, isn't it? It's very important."

"Yes." She rose herself and went to the desk, where the folder of his research sat. She laid a hand on the manila sheeting with reverence, as though it were a gravestone; he supposed to her it was.

"I had to know." There was a faint quaver in her voice, but he saw her chin firm instantly, suppressing it. "I had to know if he'd done it—if he'd saved his men—or if he'd sacrificed himself for nothing. And I had to tell Brianna. Even if she doesn't believe it—if she never believes it. Jamie was her father. I had to tell her."

"Yes, I see that. And you couldn't do it while Dr. Randall—your hus—I mean, Frank," he corrected himself, flushing, "was alive."

She smiled faintly. "It's all right; you can call Frank my husband. He was, after all, for a good many years. And Bree's right, in a way—he was her father, as well as Jamie." She glanced down at her hands, and spread the fingers of both, so the light gleamed from the two rings she wore, silver and gold. Roger was struck by a thought.

"Your ring," he said, coming to stand close by her again. "The silver one. Is there a maker's mark in it? Some of the eighteenth-century Scottish silversmiths used them. It might not be proof positive, but it's something."

Claire looked startled. Her left hand covered the right protectively, fingers rubbing the wide silver band with its pattern of Highland interlace and thistle blooms.

"I don't know," she said. A faint blush rose in her cheeks. "I haven't seen inside it. I've never taken it off." She twisted the ring slowly over the joint of the knuckle; her fingers were slender, but from long wearing, the ring had left a groove in her flesh.

She squinted at the inside of the ring, then rose and brought it to the table, where she stood next to Roger, tilting the silver circle to catch the light from the table lamp.

"There are words in it," she said wonderingly. "I never realized that he'd…Oh, dear G.o.d." Her voice broke, and the ring slipped from her fingers, rattling on the table with a tiny metal chime. Roger hurriedly scooped it up, but she had turned away, fists held tight against her middle. He knew she didn't want him to see her face; the control she had kept through the long hours of the day and the scene with Brianna had deserted her now.

He stood for a minute, feeling unbearably awkward and out of place. With a terrible feeling that he was violating a privacy that ran deeper than anything he had ever known, but not knowing what else to do, he lifted the tiny metal circle to the light and read the words inside.

"Da mi basia mille…" But it was Claire's voice that spoke the words, not his. Her voice was shaky, and he could tell that she was crying, but it was coming back under her control. She couldn't let go for long; the power of what she held leashed could so easily destroy her.

"It's Catullus. A bit of a love poem. Hugh.…Hugh Munro—he gave me the poem for a wedding present, wrapped around a bit of amber with a dragonfly inside it." Her hands, still curled into fists, had now dropped to her sides. "I couldn't say it all, still, but the one bit—I know that much." Her voice was growing steadier as she spoke, but she kept her back turned to Roger. The small silver circle glowed in his palm, still warm with the heat of the finger it had left.

"…da mi basia mille…"

Still turned away, she went on, translating,

"Then let amorous kisses dwell

On our lips, begin and tell

A Thousand and a Hundred score

A Hundred, and a Thousand more."

When she had finished, she stood still a moment, then slowly turned to face him again. Her cheeks were flushed and wet, and her lashes clumped together, but she was superficially calm.

"A hundred, and a thousand more," she said, with a feeble attempt at a smile. "But no maker's mark. So that isn't proof, either."

"Yes, it is." Roger found there seemed to be something sticking in his own throat, and hastily cleared it. "It's absolute proof. To me."

Something lit in the depths of her eyes, and the smile grew real. Then the tears welled up and overflowed as she lost her grip once and for all.

"I'm sorry," she said at last. She was sitting on the sofa, elbows on her knees, face half-buried in one of the Reverend Mr. Wakefield's huge white handkerchiefs. Roger sat close beside her, almost touching. She seemed very small and vulnerable. He wanted to pat the ash-brown curls, but felt too shy to do it.