“We are married,” Fergus said, bravely moving in front of Marsali. He looked both scared and excited, his face pale beneath the shock of black hair.
“Married!” Jamie’s hands clenched at his sides, and Fergus took an involuntary step backward, nearly treading on Marsali’s toes. “What d’ye mean, ‘married’?”
I assumed this was a rhetorical question, but it wasn’t; Jamie’s appreciation of the situation had, as usual, outstripped mine by yards and seized at once upon the salient point.
“Have ye bedded her?” he demanded bluntly. Standing behind him, I couldn’t see his face, but I knew what it must look like, if only because I could see the effect of his expression on Fergus. The Frenchman turned a couple of shades paler and licked his lips.
“Er … no, milord,” he said, just as Marsali, eyes blazing, thrust her chin up and said defiantly, “Yes, he has!”
Jamie glanced briefly back and forth between the two of them, snorted loudly, and turned away.
“Mr. Warren!” he called down the deck to the ship’s sailing master. “Put back to the shore, if ye please!”
Mr. Warren stopped, openmouthed, in the middle of an order addressed to the rigging, and stared, first at Jamie, then—quite elaborately—at the receding shoreline. In the few moments since the appearance of the putative newlyweds, the Artemis had moved more than a thousand yards from the shore, and the rocks of the cliffs were slipping by with increasing speed.
“I don’t believe he can,” I said. “I think we’re already in the tide-race.”
No sailor himself, Jamie had spent sufficient time in the company of seamen at least to understand the notion that time and tide wait for no one. He breathed through his teeth for a moment, then jerked his head toward the ladder that led belowdecks.
“Come down, then, the both of ye.”
Fergus and Marsali sat together in the tiny cabin, huddled on one berth, hands clutched tight. Jamie waved me to a seat on the other berth, then turned to the pair, hands on his hips.
“Now, then,” he said. “What’s this nonsense of bein’ married?”
“It is true, milord,” Fergus said. He was quite pale, but his dark eyes were bright with excitement. His one hand tightened on Marsali’s, his hook resting across his thigh.
“Aye?” Jamie said, with the maximum of skepticism. “And who married ye?”
The two glanced at each other, and Fergus licked his lips briefly before replying.
“We—we are handfast.”
“Before witnesses,” Marsali put in. In contrast to Fergus’s paleness, a high color burned in her cheeks. She had her mother’s roseleaf skin, but the stubborn set of her jaw had likely come from somewhere else. She put a hand to her bosom, where something crackled under the fabric. “I ha’ the contract, and the signatures, here.”
Jamie made a low growling noise in his throat. By the laws of Scotland, two people could in fact be legally married by clasping hands before witnesses—handfasting—and declaring themselves to be man and wife.
“Aye, well,” he said. “But ye’re no bedded, yet, and a contract’s not enough, in the eyes o’ the Church.” He glanced out of the stern casement, where the cliffs were just visible through the ragged mist, then nodded with decision.
“We’ll stop at Lewes for the last provisions. Marsali will go ashore there; I’ll send two seamen to see her home to her mother.”
“Ye’ll do no such thing!” Marsali cried. She sat up straight, glaring at her stepfather. “I’m going wi’ Fergus!”
“Oh, no, you’re not, my lassie!” Jamie snapped. “D’ye have no feeling for your mother? To run off, wi’ no word, and leave her to be worrit—”
“I left word.” Marsali’s square chin was high. “I sent a letter from Inverness, saying I’d married Fergus and was off to sail wi’ you.”
“Sweet bleeding Jesus! She’ll think I kent all about it!” Jamie looked horror-stricken.
“We—I—did ask the lady Laoghaire for the honor of her daughter’s hand, milord,” Fergus put in. “Last month, when I came to Lallybroch.”
“Aye. Well, ye needna tell me what she said,” Jamie said dryly, seeing the sudden flush on Fergus’s cheeks. “Since I gather the general answer was no.”
“She said he was a bastard!” Marsali burst out indignantly. “And a criminal, and—and—”
“He is a bastard and a criminal,” Jamie pointed out. “And a cripple wi’ no property, either, as I’m sure your mother noticed.”
“I dinna care!” Marsali gripped Fergus’s hand and looked at him with fierce affection. “I want him.”
Taken aback, Jamie rubbed a finger across his lips. Then he took a deep breath and returned to the attack.
“Be that as it may,” he said, “ye’re too young to be married.”
“I’m fifteen; that’s plenty old enough!”
“Aye, and he’s thirty!” Jamie snapped. He shook his head, “Nay, lassie, I’m sorry about it, but I canna let ye do it. If it were nothing else, the voyage is too dangerous—”
“You’re taking her!” Marsali’s chin jerked contemptuously in my direction.
“You’ll leave Claire out of this,” Jamie said evenly. “She’s none of your concern, and—”
“Oh, she’s not? You leave my mother for this English whore, and make her a laughingstock for the whole countryside, and it’s no my concern, is it?” Marsali leapt up and stamped her foot on the deck. “And you ha’ the hellish nerve to tell me what I shall do?”
“I have,” Jamie said, keeping hold of his temper with some difficulty. “My private affairs are not your concern—”
“And mine aren’t any of yours!”
Fergus, looking alarmed, was on his feet, trying to calm the girl.
“Marsali, ma chère, you must not speak to milord in such a way. He is only—”
“I’ll speak to him any way I want!”
“No, you will not!” Surprised at the sudden harshness in Fergus’s tone, Marsali blinked. Only an inch or two taller than his new wife, the Frenchman had a certain wiry authority that made him seem much bigger than he was.
“No,” he said more softly. “Sit down, ma p’tite.” He pressed her back down on the berth, and stood before her.
“Milord has been to me more than a father,” he said gently to the girl. “I owe him my life a thousand times. He is also your stepfather. However your mother may regard him, he has without doubt supported and sheltered her and you and your sister. You owe him respect, at the least.”
Marsali bit her lip, her eyes bright. Finally she ducked her head awkwardly at Jamie.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, and the air of tension in the cabin lessened slightly.
“It’s all right, lassie,” Jamie said gruffly. He looked at her and sighed. “But still, Marsali, we must send ye back to your mother.”
“I won’t go.” The girl was calmer now, but the set of her pointed chin was the same. She glanced at Fergus, then at Jamie. “He says we havena bedded together, but we have. Or at any rate, I shall say we have. If ye send me home, I’ll tell everyone that he’s had me; so ye see—I shall either be married or ruined.” Her tone was reasonable and determined. Jamie closed his eyes.
“May the Lord deliver me from women,” he said between his teeth. He opened his eyes and glared at her.
“All right!” he said. “You’re married. But you’ll do it right, before a priest. We’ll find one in the Indies, when we land. And until ye’ve been blessed, Fergus doesna touch you. Aye?” He turned a ferocious gaze on both of them.
“Yes, milord,” said Fergus, his features suffused with joy. “Merci beaucoup!” Marsali narrowed her eyes at Jamie, but seeing that he wasn’t to be moved, she bowed her head demurely, with a sidelong glance at me.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
* * *
The question of Fergus’s elopement had at least distracted Jamie’s mind temporarily from the motion of the ship, but the palliative effect didn’t
last. He held on grimly nevertheless, turning greener by the moment, but refusing to leave the deck and go below, so long as the shore of Scotland was in sight.
“I may never see it again,” he said gloomily, when I tried to persuade him to go below and lie down. He leaned heavily on the rail he had just been vomiting over, eyes resting longingly on the unprepossessingly bleak coast behind us.
“No, you’ll see it,” I said, with an unthinking surety. “You’re coming back. I don’t know when, but I know you’ll come back.”
He turned his head to look up at me, puzzled. Then the ghost of a smile crossed his face.
“You’ve seen my grave,” he said softly. “Haven’t ye?”
I hesitated, but he didn’t seem upset, and I nodded.
“It’s all right,” he said. He closed his eyes, breathing heavily. “Don’t … don’t tell me when, though, if ye dinna mind.”
“I can’t,” I said. “There weren’t any dates on it. Just your name—and mine.”
“Yours?” His eyes popped open.
I nodded again, feeling my throat tighten at the memory of that granite slab. It had been what they call a “marriage stone,” a quarter-circle carved to fit with another in a complete arch. I had, of course, seen only the one half.
“It had all your names on it. That’s how I knew it was you. And underneath, it said, ‘Beloved husband of Claire.’ At the time, I didn’t see how—but now, of course, I do.”
He nodded slowly, absorbing it. “Aye, I see. Aye well, I suppose if I shall be in Scotland, and still married to you—then maybe ‘when’ doesna matter so much.” He gave me a shadow of his usual grin, and added wryly, “It also means we’ll find Young Ian safe, for I’ll tell ye, Sassenach, I willna set foot in Scotland again without him.”
“We’ll find him,” I said, with an assurance I didn’t altogether feel. I put a hand on his shoulder and stood beside him, watching Scotland slowly recede in the distance.
* * *
By the time evening set in, the rocks of Scotland had disappeared in the sea mists, and Jamie, chilled to the bone and pale as a sheet, suffered himself to be led below and put to bed. At this point, the unforeseen consequences of his ultimatum to Fergus became apparent.
There were only two small private cabins, besides the Captain’s; if Fergus and Marsali were forbidden to share one until their union was formally blessed, then clearly Jamie and Fergus would have to take one, and Marsali and I the other. It seemed destined to be a rough voyage, in more ways than one.
I had hoped that the sickness might ease, if Jamie couldn’t see the slow heave and fall of the horizon, but no such luck.
“Again?” said Fergus, sleepily rousing on one elbow in his berth, in the middle of the night. “How can he? He has eaten nothing all day!”
“Tell him that,” I said, trying to breathe through my mouth as I sidled toward the door, a basin in my hands, making my way with difficulty through the tiny, cramped quarters. The deck rose and fell beneath my unaccustomed feet, making it hard to keep my balance.
“Here, milady, allow me.” Fergus swung bare feet out of bed and stood up beside me, staggering and nearly bumping into me as he reached for the basin.
“You should go and sleep now, milady,” he said, taking it from my hands. “I will see to him, be assured.”
“Well …” The thought of my berth was undeniably tempting. It had been a long day.
“Go, Sassenach,” Jamie said. His face was a ghastly white, sheened with sweat in the dim light of the small oil light that burned on the wall. “I’ll be all right.”
This was patently untrue; at the same time, it was unlikely that my presence would help particularly. Fergus could do the little that could be done; there was no known cure for seasickness, after all. One could only hope that Jared was right, and that it would ease of itself as the Artemis made its way out into the longer swells of the Atlantic.
“All right,” I said, giving in. “Perhaps you’ll feel better in the morning.”
Jamie opened one eye for a moment, then groaned, and shivering, closed it again.
“Or perhaps I’ll be dead,” he suggested.
On that cheery note, I made my way out into the dark companionway, only to stumble over the prostrate form of Mr. Willoughby, curled up against the door of the cabin. He grunted in surprise, then, seeing that it was only me, rolled slowly onto all fours and crawled into the cabin, swaying with the rolling of the ship. Ignoring Fergus’s exclamation of distate, he curled himself about the pedestal of the table, and fell promptly back asleep, an expression of beatific content on his small round face.
My own cabin was just across the companionway, but I paused for a moment, to breathe in the fresh air coming down from the deck above. There was an extraordinary variety of noises, from the creak and crack of timbers all around, to the snap of sails and the whine of rigging above, and the faint echo of a shout somewhere on deck.
Despite the racket and the cold air pouring in down the companionway, Marsali was sound asleep, a humped black shape in one of the two berths. Just as well; at least I needn’t try to make awkward conversation with her.
Despite myself, I felt a pang of sympathy for her; this was likely not what she had expected of her wedding night. It was too cold to undress; fully clothed, I crawled into my small box-berth and lay listening to the sounds of the ship around me. I could hear the hissing of the water passing the hull, only a foot or two beyond my head. It was an oddly comforting sound. To the accompaniment of the song of the wind and the faint sound of retching across the corridor, I fell peacefully asleep.
* * *
The Artemis was a tidy ship, as ships go, but when you cram thirty-two men—and two women—into a space eighty feet long and twenty-five wide, together with six tons of rough-cured hides, forty-two barrels of sulfur, and enough sheets of copper and tin to sheathe the Queen Mary, basic hygiene is bound to suffer.
By the second day, I had already flushed a rat—a small rat, as Fergus pointed out, but still a rat—in the hold where I went to retrieve my large medicine box, packed away there by mistake during the loading. There was a soft shuffling noise in my cabin at night, which when the lantern was lit proved to be the footsteps of several dozen middling-size cockroaches, all fleeing frantically for the shelter of the shadows.
The heads, two small quarter-galleries on either side of the ship toward the bow, were nothing more than a pair of boards—with a strategic slot between them—suspended over the bounding waves eight feet below, so that the user was likely to get an unexpected dash of cold seawater at some highly inopportune moment. I suspected that this, coupled with a diet of salt pork and hardtack, likely caused constipation to be epidemic among seamen.
Mr. Warren, the ship’s master, proudly informed me that the decks were swabbed regularly every morning, the brass polished, and everything generally made shipshape, which seemed a desirable state of affairs, given that we were in fact aboard a ship. Still, all the holystoning in the world could not disguise the fact that thirty-four human beings occupied this limited space, and only one of us bathed.
Given such circumstances, I was more than startled when I opened the door of the galley on the second morning, in search of boiling water.
I had expected the same dim and grubby conditions that obtained in the cabins and holds, and was dazzled by the glitter of sunlight through the overhead lattice on a rank of copper pans, so scrubbed that the metal of their bottoms shone pink. I blinked against the dazzle, my eyes adjusting, and saw that the walls of the galley were solid with built-in racks and cupboards, so constructed as to be proof against the roughest seas.
Blue and green glass bottles of spice, each tenderly jacketed in felt against injury, vibrated softly in their rack above the pots. Knives, cleavers, and skewers gleamed in deadly array, in a quantity sufficient to deal with a whale carcass, should one present itself. A rimmed double shelf hung from the bulkhead, thick with bulb glasses and shallow plates, on which a quan
tity of fresh-cut turnip tops were set to sprout for greens. An enormous pot bubbled softly over the stove, emitting a fragrant steam. And in the midst of all this spotless splendor stood the cook, surveying me with baleful eye.
“Out,” he said.
“Good morning,” I said, as cordially as possible. “My name is Claire Fraser.”
“Out,” he repeated, in the same graveled tones.
“I am Mrs. Fraser, the wife of the supercargo, and ship’s surgeon for this voyage,” I said, giving him eyeball for eyeball. “I require six gallons of boiling water, when convenient, for cleaning of the head.”
His small, bright blue eyes grew somewhat smaller and brighter, the black pupils of them training on me like gunbarrels.
“I am Aloysius O’Shaughnessy Murphy,” he said. “Ship’s cook. And I require ye to take yer feet off my fresh-washed deck. I do not allow women in my galley.” He glowered at me under the edge of the black cotton kerchief that swathed his head. He was several inches shorter than I, but made up for it by measuring about three feet more in circumference, with a wrestler’s shoulders and a head like a cannonball, set upon them without apparent benefit of an intervening neck. A wooden leg completed the ensemble.
I took one step back, with dignity, and spoke to him from the relative safety of the passageway.
“In that case,” I said, “you may send up the hot water by the messboy.”
“I may,” he agreed. “And then again, I may not.” He turned his broad back on me in dismissal, busying himself with a chopping block, a cleaver, and a joint of mutton.
I stood in the passageway for a moment, thinking. The thud of the cleaver sounded regularly against the wood. Mr. Murphy reached up to his spice rack, grasped a bottle without looking, and sprinkled a good quantity of the contents over the diced meat. The dusty scent of sage filled the air, superseded at once by the pungency of an onion, whacked in two with a casual swipe of the cleaver and tossed into the mixture.
Evidently the crew of the Artemis did not subsist entirely upon salt pork and hardtack, then. I began to understand the reasons for Captain Raines’s rather pear-shaped physique. I poked my head back through the door, taking care to stand outside.
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