Fraser’s Ridge October, 1771
THE SEASON CHANGED, from one hour to the next. She had gone to sleep in the cool balm of an Indian summer evening, and wakened in the middle of the night to the sharp bite of autumn, her feet freezing under the single quilt. Still drowsy, she couldn’t fall sleep again, not without more covers.
She dragged slit-eyed out of bed, padded over the icy floor to check Jemmy. He was warm enough, sunk deep into his tiny featherbed, the quilt drawn up around his small pink ears. She laid a gentle hand on his back, waiting for the reassurance of the rise and fall of his breath. Once, twice, once more.
She rummaged for an extra quilt and spread it on the bed, reached for a cup of water to ease her dry throat, and realized with a grunt of annoyance that it was empty. She thought with longing of crawling back into bed, sinking into deep, warm slumber—but not dying of thirst.
There was a bucket of well water by the stoop. Yawning and grimacing, she slid the bolt from its brackets and set it gently down—though Jem slept so soundly at night, there wasn’t much danger of waking him.
Still, she opened the door with care and stepped out, shivering slightly as the cold air twitched the shift about her legs. She bent and groped in the darkness. No bucket. Where—
She saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her eye and whirled. For an instant, she thought it was Obadiah Henderson, sitting on the bench beside her door, and her heart clenched like a fist as he stood up. Then she realized, and was in Roger’s arms before her mind could consciously sort out the details of him.
Pressed against him, speechless, she had time to notice things: the arch of his collarbone against her face, the smell of clothes gone so long worn, so long unwashed that they didn’t smell even of sweat any longer, but of the wood he walked through and the earth he slept upon, and mostly of the bitter smoke he breathed. The strength of his arm about her and the rasp of his beard on her skin. The cracked cold leather of his shoes beneath her bare toes, and the shape of the bones of his feet within them.
“It’s you,” she said, and was crying. “You’re home!”
“Aye, I’m home,” he whispered in her ear. “You’re well? Jem’s well?”
She relaxed her hold on his ribs and he smiled at her, so strange to see his smile through a growth of thick black beard, the curve of his lips familiar in the moonlight.
“We’re fine. You’re all right?” She sniffed, eyes overflowing as she looked at him. “What are you doing out here, for heaven’s sake? Why didn’t you knock?”
“Aye. I’m fine. I didn’t want to scare ye. Thought I’d sleep out here, knock in the morning. Why are ye crying?”
She realized then that he wasn’t whispering from any desire to avoid waking Jem; what voice he had was a ragged husk, warped and breathless. And yet he spoke clearly, the words unforced, without the painful hesitation he had had.
“You can talk,” she said, wiping hastily at her eyes with the back of a wrist. “I mean—better.” Once, she would have hesitated to touch his throat, fearful of his feelings, but instinct knew better than to waste the sudden intimacy of shock. The strain might come again, and they be strangers, but for a moment, for this moment in the dark, she could say anything, do anything, and she put her fingers on the warm ragged scar, touched the incision that had saved his life, a clean white line through the whiskers.
“Does it still hurt to talk?”
“It hurts,” he said, in the faint croaking rasp, and his eyes met hers, dark and soft in the moonlight. “But I can. I will—Brianna.”
She stepped back, one hand on his arm, unwilling to let go.
“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”
I HAD ANY NUMBER of objections to hearthfire, ranging from splinters under the fingernails and pitch on the hands to blisters, burns, and the sheer infuriating contrariness of the element. I would, however, say two things in its favor: it was undeniably warm, and it cast the act of love in a light of such dim beauty that all the hesitations of nakedness could safely be forgotten.
Our mingled shadows flowed together on the wall, here a limb, there the curve of back or haunch showed clean, some part of an undulating beast. Jamie’s head rose clear, a great maned creature looming over me, back arched in his extremity.
I reached up across the stretch of glowing skin and trembling muscle, brushed the sparking hairs of arms and chest, to bury my hands in the warmth of his hair and pull him down gasping to the dark hollow of my breasts.
I kept my eyes half-closed, my legs as well, unwilling to surrender his body, to give up the illusion of oneness—if illusion it was. How many more times might I hold him so, even in the enchantment of firelight?
I clung with all my might to him, and to the dying pulse of my own flesh. But joy grasped is joy vanished, and within moments I was no more than myself. The dark starburst on my ankle showed clearly, even in firelight.
I slackened my grip on his shoulders and touched the rough whorls of his hair with tenderness. He turned his head and kissed my breast, then stirred and sighed and slid sideways.
“And they say hen’s teeth are rare,” he said, gingerly touching a deep bite-mark on one shoulder.
I laughed, in spite of myself.
“As rare as a rooster’s cock, I suppose.” I raised myself on one elbow and peered toward the hearth.
“What is it, wee hen?”
“Just making sure my clothes won’t catch fire.” What with one thing and another, I hadn’t much noticed where he’d thrown my garments, but they seemed to be a safe distance from the flames; the skirt was in a small heap by the bed, the bodice and shift somehow had ended up in separate corners of the room. My brassiere-strip was nowhere to be seen.
Light flickered on the whitewashed walls, and the bed was full of shadows.
“You are beautiful,” he whispered to me.
“If you say so.”
“Do ye not believe me? Have I ever lied to you?”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean—if you say it, then it’s true. You make it true.”
He sighed and shifted, easing us into comfort. A log cracked suddenly in the hearth, sending up a spray of gold sparks, and subsided, hissing as the heat struck a hidden seam of damp. I watched the new wood turn black, then red, blazing into white-hot light.
“Do ye say it of me, Sassenach?” he asked suddenly. He sounded shy, and I turned my head to look up at him in surprise.
“Do I say what? That you’re beautiful?” My mouth curved involuntarily, and he smiled in return.
“Well . . . not that. But that ye can bear my looks, at least.”
I traced the faint white line of the scar across his ribs, left by a sword, long ago. The longer, thicker scar of the bayonet that had ripped the length of one thigh. The arm that held me, browned and roughened, the hairs of it bleached white-gold with long days of sun and work. Near my hand, his cock curled between his thighs, gone soft and small and tender now, in its nest of auburn hair.
“You’re beautiful to me, Jamie,” I said softly, at last. “So beautiful, you break my heart.”
His hand traced the knobs of my backbone, one at a time.
“But I am an auld man,” he said, smiling. “Or should be. I’ve white hairs in my head; my beard’s gone gray.”
“Silver,” I said, brushing the soft stubble on his chin, parti-colored as a quilt. “In bits.”
“Gray,” he said firmly. “And scabbit-looking with it. And yet . . .” His eyes softened as he looked at me. “Yet I burn when I come to ye, Sassenach—and will, I think, ’til we two be burned to ashes.”
“Is that poetry?” I asked cautiously. “Or do you mean it literally?”
“Oh,” he said. “No. I hadna meant . . . no.” He tightened his arm around me and bent his head to mine.
“I dinna ken about that. If it should be—”
“It won’t.”
A breath of laughter stirred my hair.
“Ye sound verra sure of it, Sassenach.”
“The future can be changed; I do it all the time.”
“Oh, aye?”
I rolled away a bit, to look at him.
“I do. Look at Mairi MacNeill. If I hadn’t been there last week, she would have died, and her twins with her. But I was there, and they didn’t.”
I put a hand behind my head, watching the reflection of the flames ripple like water across the ceiling beams.
“I do wonder—there are lots I can’t save, but some I do. If someone lives because of me, and later has children, and they have children, and so on . . . well, by the time you reach my time, say, there are probably thirty or forty people in the world who wouldn’t otherwise have been there, hm? And they’ve all been doing things meanwhile, living their lives—don’t you think that’s changing the future?” For the first time, it occurred to me to wonder just how much I was single-handedly contributing to the population explosion of the twentieth century.
“Aye,” he said slowly. He picked up my free hand and traced the lines of my palm with one long finger.
“Aye, but it’s their future ye change, Sassenach, and perhaps you’re meant to.” He took my hand in his and pulled gently on the fingers. One knuckle popped, making a small sound like a log spitting in the hearth. “Physicians have saved a good many folk over the years, surely.”
“Of course they do. And not just physicians, either.” I sat up, impelled by the force of my argument. “But it doesn’t matter—don’t you see? You—” I pointed one finger at him, “—you’ve saved a life now and then. Fergus? Ian? And here they are, both going about the world doing things and procreating and what-not. You changed the future for them, didn’t you?”
“Aye, well . . . perhaps. I couldna do otherwise, though, could I?”
That simple statement stopped me, and we lay in silence for a bit, watching the flicker of light on the white-plastered wall. At last he stirred beside me, and spoke again.
“I dinna say it for pity,” he said. “But ye ken . . . now and then my bones ache a bit.” He didn’t look at me, but spread his crippled hand, turning it in the light, so the shadow of the crooked fingers made a spider on the wall.
Now and then. I kent, all right. I knew the limits of the body—and its miracles. I’d seen him sit down at the end of a day’s labor, exhaustion written in every line of his body. Seen him move slowly, stubborn against the protests of flesh and bone when he rose on cold mornings. I would be willing to bet that he had not lived a day since Culloden without pain, the physical damages of war aggravated by damp and harsh living. And I would also be willing to bet that he had never mentioned it to anyone. Until now.
“I know that,” I said softly, and touched the hand. The twisting scar that runneled his leg. The small depression in the flesh of his arm, legacy of a bullet.
“But not with you,” he said, and covered my hand where it lay on his arm. “D’ye ken that the only time I am without pain is in your bed, Sassenach? When I take ye, when I lie in your arms—my wounds are healed, then, my scars forgotten.”
I sighed and laid my head in the curve of his shoulder. My thigh pressed his, the softness of my flesh a mold to his harder form.
“Mine, too.”
He was silent for a time, stroking my hair with his good hand. It was wild and bushy, freed from its moorings by our earlier struggles, and he smoothed one curly strand at a time, combing down each lock between his fingers.
“Your hair’s like a great storm cloud, Sassenach,” he murmured, sounding half-asleep. “All dark and light together. No two hairs are the same color.”
He was right; the lock between his fingers bore strands of pure white, of silver and blond, dark streaks, nearly sable, and several bits still of my young light brown.
His fingers went under the mass of hair, and I felt his hand cup the base of my skull, holding my head like a chalice.
“I saw my mother in her coffin,” he said at last. His thumb touched my ear, drew down the curve of helix and lobule, and I shivered at his touch.
“The women had plaited her hair, to be seemly, but my father wouldna have it. I heard him. He didna shout, though, he was verra quiet. He would have his last sight of her as she was to him, he said. He was half-crazed wi’ grief, they said, he should let well alone, be still. He didna trouble to say more to them, but went to the coffin himself. He undid her plaits and he spread out her hair in his two hands across the pillow. They were afraid to stop him.”
He paused, his thumb stilled.
“I was there, keepin’ quiet in the corner. When they all went out to meet the priest, I crept up close. I hadna seen a dead person before.”
I let my fingers curl over the ridge of his forearm, quietly. My mother had left me one morning, kissed my forehead, and slid in the clip that fell out of my curly hair. I had never seen her again. Her coffin had been closed.
“Was it—her?”
“No,” he said softly. His eyes were half-lidded as he looked into the fire. “Not quite. The face had the look of her, but no more. Like as if someone had set out to carve her from birch wood. But her hair—that was still alive. That was still . . . her.”
I heard him swallow, and half-clear his throat.
“The hair lay down across her breast, so it covered the child who lay with her. I thought perhaps he wouldna like it; to be smothered so. So I lifted up the locks of red to let him out. I could see him—my wee brother, curled up in her arms, wi’ his head on her breast, all shadowed and snug under the curtain of her hair.
“So then I thought no, he’d be happier if I left him so—so I smoothed her hair down again, to cover his head.” He drew a deep breath, and I felt his chest rise under my cheek. His fingers ran slowly down through my hair.
“She hadna one white hair, Sassenach. Not one.”
Ellen Fraser had died in childbirth, aged thirty-eight. My own mother had been thirty-two. And I . . . I had the richness of all those long years lost to them. And more.
“To see the years touch ye gives me joy, Sassenach,” he whispered, “—for it means that ye live.”
He lifted his hand and let my hair fall slowly from his fingers, brushing my face, skimming my lips, floating soft and heavy on my neck and shoulders, lying like feathers at the tops of my breasts.
“Mo nighean donn,” he whispered, “mo chridhe. My brown lass, my heart.”
“Come to me. Cover me. Shelter me, a bhean, heal me. Burn with me, as I burn for you.”
I lay on him, covered him, my skin, his bone, and still—still!—that fierce bright core of flesh to join us. I let my hair fall down around us both, and in the fire-shot cavern of its darkness, whispered back.
“Until we two be burned to ashes.”
