With Jamie too ill to act as laird of the manor, Roger is called to greet a newcomer to the Ridge: another ex-Ardsmuir prisoner, Tom Christie, who has come with his son and daughter to settle on the Ridge. Roger welcomes them and assigns them land, offering assistance with tools and building, then congratulates himself on handling things in Jamie’s stead. Jamie, informed of this, is a little less enthusiastic. Tom Christie, he tells Claire, is a worthy man, though a stubborn one, and a Protestant. Beyond that…Jamie was compelled to kill a sadistic guard at Ardsmuir, strangling the man and throwing his body into the quarry there. There were only two witnesses to this: Duncan Innes and Tom Christie.
PART 9: A DANGEROUS BUSINESS
Returning to her medical practice on the Ridge, Claire is recording case notes in the book left by Dr. Daniel Rawlings, the original owner of her medical box. While doing so, she discovers Dr. Rawlings’s notes of a visit to River Run Plantation and, within these notes, a clue suggesting that the doctor had heard of or seen the famous Frenchman’s gold.
Jamie has for months been writing regularly to his sister and brother-in-law at Lallybroch, in Scotland. Ian, his brother-in-law, writes back cordially, but his sister has been silent—furious with him for his part in the loss of her youngest son, Young Ian. He is therefore surprised, though pleased, to get a letter from her, officially forgiving him.
…I see that it is cowardice indeed that I should go on blaming you for Young Ian. I have always kent what it is to love a man—be he husband or lover, brother or son. A dangerous business; that’s what it is.
Men go where they will, they do as they must; it is not a woman’s part to bid them stay, nor yet to reproach them for being what they are—or for not coming back.
I knew it when I sent Ian to France with a cross of birchwood and a lock of my hair made into a love knot, praying that he might come home to me, body and soul. I knew it when I gave you a rosary and saw you off to Leoch, hoping you would not forget Lallybroch or me. I knew it when Young Jamie swam to the seal’s island, when Michael took ship for Paris, and I should have known it, too, when wee Ian went with you.
But I have been blessed in my life; my men have always come back to me. Maimed, perhaps; a bit singed round the edges now and then; crippled, crumpled, tattered, and torn—but I have always got them back. I grew to expect that as my right, and I was wrong to do so.
I have seen so many widows since the Rising. I cannot say why I thought I should be exempt from their suffering, why I alone should lose none of my men, and only one of my babes, my wee girl-child. And since I had lost Caitlin, I treasured Ian, for I knew he was the last babe I should bear.
I thought him my babe still; I should have kent him for the man he was. And that being so, I know well enough that whether you might have stopped him or no, you would not—for you are one of the damnable creatures, too.
Now I have nearly reached the end of this sheet, and I think it profligate to begin another.
Mother loved you always, Jamie, and when she kent she was dying, she called for me, and bade me care for you. As though I could ever stop.
Your most Affectionate and Loving Sister,
Janet Flora Arabella Fraser Murray
Jamie held the paper for a moment, then set it down, very gently. He sat with his head bent, propped on his hand so that I couldn’t see his face. His fingers were splayed through his hair, and kept moving, massaging his forehead as he slowly shook his head, back and forth. I could hear him breathing, with a slight catch in his breath now and then.
Finally he dropped his hand and looked up at me, blinking. His face was deeply flushed, there were tears in his eyes, and he wore the most remarkable expression, in which bewilderment, fury, and laughter were all mingled, laughter being only slightly uppermost.
“Oh, God,” he said. He sniffed, and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. “Oh, Christ. How in hell does she do that?”
“Do what?” I pulled a clean handkerchief from my bodice and handed it to him.
“Make me feel as though I am eight years old,” he said ruefully. “And an idiot, to boot.”
He wiped his nose, then reached out a hand to touch the flattened roses, gently.
THE WEATHER THAWS into spring, and the Frasers and MacKenzies come down from their mountain once more, to do business in Wilmington. Jamie has heard no more from Mr. Lyon, and no further intrusions have disturbed River Run, but he is in hopes of learning more regarding the present whereabouts of Stephen Bonnet.
An ex-shipmate of Roger’s, a Scot named Duff, proves to have such intelligence; he tells Roger and Jamie that Bonnet has a regular smuggling run, bringing in large loads of contraband every two weeks, on the coast between Virginia and Charleston. This argues a covert connection between Bonnet and someone in the Navy, because it would be hard for such a large operation to escape notice altogether.
Jamie leaves Duff with instructions to bring him any information that comes to hand regarding Bonnet’s movements—and within a few days, such information is in hand. Roger and Jamie go together to a secluded landing, owned by Phillip Wylie, where Bonnet is expected to arrive with a load of contraband, intending there to meet and kill the man.
Instead of Stephen Bonnet, though, they discover a family of Russian immigrants, hiding in the sheds, they having arrived on a boat bringing Russian wild boar to stock Wylie’s land for hunting and decided to stay. While they are interrogating the Russians, two boats arrive, filled with men who overcome the Russians and take control of the landing. But Stephen Bonnet isn’t present; the invasive force is commanded by Sheriff Anstruther and magistrate Lillywhite, who have a pressing interest in Bonnet’s contraband. They take Roger hostage, but Jamie hides on the roof of one of the sheds.
Jamie and Roger escape and, in so doing, meet Phillip Wylie, out spear hunting with several of his slaves. Wylie is incensed upon learning that his landing is being used for illicit purposes, and despite Jamie not being one of his favorite people, he at once agrees to help.
When they return to the landing, though, Anstruther and Lillywhite have taken a boat and disappeared. Heading back toward Wylie’s house, Roger and Jamie are ambushed by Lillywhite and Anstruther, and in the mêlée, Roger accidentally kills Lillywhite. Jamie, much less accidentally, has already killed Anstruther. After Jamie and Roger pull themselves back together, Jamie speculates that Lillywhite and company have been trying to kill them at the behest of Stephen Bonnet—who plainly knows by this time that Jamie is after him and unlikely to be dissuaded from pursuit by anything short of death. He wonders aloud where Bonnet is just now, only to find that Roger has the answer.
“Wilmington.”
Jamie swung round, frowning at him.
“What?”
“Wilmington,” Roger repeated. He cautiously opened the other eye, but it seemed all right. Only one Jamie. “That’s what Lillywhite said—but I thought he was joking.”
Jamie stared at him for a moment.
“I hope to Christ he was,” he said.
Jamie hopes Lillywhite was joking, because Wilmington is where the women are: Claire, Brianna, and Marsali, together with the children. The whole party is in fact out on the coastal flats near Wilmington, gathering wax myrtle berries for candle-making. Unfortunately, Lillywhite was not joking; Stephen Bonnet is in Wilmington, has heard about the presence of the Frasers, and follows the women, surprising Claire among the myrtle bushes.
“A homestead,” he repeated, a muscle twitching in his cheek. “What business brings ye so far from home, and I might ask?”
“You might not,” I said. “Or rather—you might ask my husband. He’ll be along shortly.”
I took another step backward as I said this, and he took a step toward me at the same time. A flicker of panic must have crossed my face, for he looked amused, and took another step.
“Oh, I doubt that, Mrs. Fraser dear. For see, the man’s dead by now.”
I squeezed Jemmy so hard that he let out a strangled squawk.
“What do you mean?” I demanded hoarsely. The blood was draining from my head, coagulating in an icy ball round my heart.
“Well, d’ye see, it was a bargain,” he said, the look of amusement growing. “A division of duties, ye might say. My friend Lillywhite and the good sheriff were to attend to Mr. Fraser and Mr. MacKenzie, and Lieutenant Wolff was to manage Mrs. Cameron’s end of the business. That left me with the pleasant task of makin’ myself reacquainted with my son and his mother.” His eyes sharpened, focusing on Jemmy.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said, through stiff lips, taking a better grip on Jemmy, who was watching Bonnet, owl-eyed.
He gave a short laugh at that.
“Sure, and ye’re no hand at lyin’, ma’am; you’ll forgive the observation. Ye’d never make a card player. Ye know well enough what I mean—ye saw me there, at River Run. Though I confess as how I should be obliged to hear exactly what you and Mr. Fraser was engaged in, a-butchering that Negro woman that Wolff killed. I did hear as how the picture of a murderer shows in the victim’s eyes—but ye didn’t seem to be looking at her eyes, from what I could see. Was it magic of a sort ye were after doing?”
“Wolff—it was him, then?” Just at the moment, I didn’t really care whether Lieutenant Wolff had murdered scores of women, but I was willing to engage in any line of conversation that offered the possibility of distracting him.
Distraction can’t keep children quiet, though, and Bonnet ends up face-to-face with Brianna and Jem.
“He’s not your son,” Brianna said, low-voiced and vicious.“He’ll never be yours.”
He grunted contemptuously.
“Oh, aye? That’s not how I heard it, in that dungeon in Cross Creek, sweetheart. And now I see him…” He looked at Jemmy again, nodding slowly. “He’s mine, darlin’ girl. He’s the look of me—haven’t ye, boyo?”
Jemmy buried his face in Brianna’s skirts, howling.
Bonnet sighed, shrugged, and gave up any pretense of cajolement.
“Come on, then,” he said, and started forward, obviously intending to scoop Jemmy up.
Brianna’s hand rose out of her skirts, and aimed the pistol I had yanked out of his belt back at the place it had come from. Bonnet stopped in mid-step, mouth open.
“What about it?” she whispered, and her eyes were fixed, unblinking. “Do you keep your powder dry, Stephen?”
She braced the pistol with both hands, drew aim at his crotch, and fired.
BADLY WOUNDED BUT not dead, Bonnet flees, leaving the women to flee in the other direction, back to Wilmington, where they meet Roger and Jamie two days later, coming back from their expedition.
The party heads back toward the Ridge but stops at River Run Plantation, where they find matters in some disarray, Duncan suffering from a freshly broken leg. This injury was sustained during a fight with Lieutenant Wolff, who had come back for a fresh try. The lieutenant, though, suffered a fall and smacked his head on the walk. Whereupon…
“Ulysses killed him,” Duncan said baldly, then stopped, as though appalled afresh. He swallowed, looking deeply unhappy. “Jo says as how she ordered him to do it—and Christ knows, Mac Dubh, she might have done so. She’s no the woman to be trifled with, let alone to have her servants murdered, herself threatened, and her husband set upon.”
I gathered from his hesitance, though, that some small doubt about Jocasta’s part in this still lingered in his mind.
Jamie had grasped the main point troubling him, though.
“Christ,” he said. “The man Ulysses will be hangit on the spot, or worse, if anyone hears of it. Whether my aunt ordered it, or no.”
Duncan looked a little calmer, now that the truth was out. He nodded.
“Aye, that’s it,” he agreed. “I canna let him go to the gallows—but what am I to do about the Lieutenant? There’s the Navy to be considered, to say nothing of sheriffs and magistrates.”
That was a definite point. A good deal of the prosperity of River Run depended upon its naval contracts for timber and tar; Lieutenant Wolff had in fact been the naval liaison responsible for such contracts. I could see that His Majesty’s Navy might just possibly be inclined to look squiggle-eyed at a proprietor who had killed his local naval representative, no matter what the excuse.
Ulysses has prudently disappeared, leaving the Frasers and Duncan to consider how best to handle the lieutenant’s death. Dispose of the body quietly, is the consensus, and after some discussion they decide to inter the lieutenant, at least temporarily, in Hector Cameron’s mausoleum. In so doing, though, they make two shocking discoveries: one is the body of the late Dr. Rawlings, who presumably ran afoul of Ulysses while snooping round River Run and was killed. The other is Jocasta’s coffin. Twin to Hector’s, it is presumably awaiting receipt of its mistress’s body—but the coffin is already full. The hiding place of the Frenchman’s gold is a secret no more.
With the threats against them apparently ended, the Frasers and MacKenzies return to their home on the Ridge, to the settling of the new community, to tragedy (the death of Rosamund Lindsay, ironically killed by anaphylactic shock brought on by penicillin allergy), and to a surprising reunion.
Roger takes little Jem with him and Jamie on a small expedition into the woods. Things take a dangerous turn, though, when they meet with a wild boar, a huge feral pig that sees Jemmy as a tasty snack. The men fight off the boar but then hear the snarl and growl of a wolf, drawn by the scent of the injured pig’s blood.
“WOLVES!” HE SHOUTED to Jamie, and with a feeling that wolves on top of pigs was patently unfair, reached Jemmy, grabbed the knife, and threw himself on top of the boy.
He pressed himself to the ground, feeling Jemmy squirm frantically under him, and waited, feeling strangely calm. Would it be tusk or tooth? he wondered.
“It’s all right, Jem. Be still. It’s all right, Daddy’s got you.” His forehead was pressed against the earth, Jem’s head tucked in the hollow of his shoulder. He had one arm sheltering the little boy, the knife gripped in his other hand. He hunched his shoulders, feeling the back of his neck bare and vulnerable, but couldn’t move to protect it.
He could hear the wolf now, howling and yipping to its companions. The boar was making an ungodly noise, a sort of long, continuous scream, and Jamie, too short of breath to go on shouting, seemed to be calling it names in brief, incoherent bursts of Gaelic.
There was an odd whirr overhead and a peculiar, hollow-sounding thump!, succeeded by sudden and utter silence.
Startled, Roger raised his head a few inches, and saw the pig standing a few feet before him, its jaw hanging open in what looked like sheer astonishment. Jamie was standing behind it, smeared from forehead to knee with blood-streaked mud, and wearing an identical expression.
Then the boar’s front legs gave way and it fell to its knees. It wobbled, eyes glazing, and collapsed onto its side, the shaft of an arrow poking up, looking frail and inconsequential by comparison to the animal’s bulk.
Jemmy was squirming and crying underneath him. He sat up slowly, and gathered the little boy up into his arms. He noticed, remotely, that his hands were shaking, but he felt curiously blank. The torn skin on his palms stung, and his knee was throbbing. Patting Jemmy’s back in automatic comfort, he turned his head toward the wood and saw the Indian standing at the edge of the trees, bow in hand.
It occurred to him, dimly, to look for the wolf. It was nosing at the pig’s carcass, no more than a few feet from Jamie, but his father-in-law was paying it no mind at all. He too was staring at the Indian.
“Ian,” he said softly, and a look of incredulous joy blossomed slowly through the smears of mud, grass, and blood. “Oh, Christ. It’s Ian.”
The joy of Young Ian’s return is not unalloyed. Lizzie Wemyss, once in love with Ian, is now betrothed to Manfred McGillivray but shows signs of wavering in her affections. Beyond that, Young Ian has brought with him the diary of Otter-Tooth, a Mohawk cast out of the tribe an
d killed some years before. The diary is written in Latin and makes it quite clear that Otter-Tooth was a time traveler; the diary is an account of his arrival in the past and his attempts to change history, with a number of companions, none of whom apparently survived the attempt.
Claire has a huge raw opal that once belonged to Otter-Tooth, given to her by Tewaktenyonh, one of the matriarchs of the Mohawk tribe that adoped Ian. She takes this down during the discussion, and in the course of the conversation, Jemmy takes the stone to play with.
I was opening my mouth to ask Ian about his wife, when I heard Jemmy. He had retired back under the table with his prize, and had been talking to it in a genially conversational—if unintelligible—manner for several minutes. His voice had suddenly changed, though, to a tone of alarm.
“Hot,” he said, “Mummy, HOT!”
Brianna was already rising from her stool, a look of concern on her face, when I heard the noise. It was a high-pitched ringing sound, like the weird singing of a crystal goblet when you run a wet finger round and round the rim. Roger sat up straight, looking startled.
Brianna bent and snatched Jemmy out from under the table, and as she straightened with him, there was a sudden pow! like a gunshot, and the ringing noise abruptly stopped.
“Holy God,” said Jamie, rather mildly under the circumstances.
Splinters of glimmering fire protruded from the bookshelf, the books, the walls, and the thick folds of Brianna’s skirts. One had whizzed past Roger’s head, barely nicking his ear; a thin trickle of blood was running down his neck, though he didn’t seem to have noticed yet.
A stipple of brilliant pinpoints glinted on the table—a shower of the sharp needles had been thrust upward through the inch-thick wood. I heard Ian exclaim sharply, and bend to pull a tiny shaft from the flesh of his calf. Jemmy began to cry. Outside, Rollo the dog was barking furiously.
The opal had exploded.
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 6