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

by Diana Gabaldon

  In point of fact, I looked like a skeleton with a particularly unflattering crew cut, as I learned when I finally gained sufficient strength as to force Jamie to bring me a looking glass.

  “I dinna suppose ye’d think of wearing a cap?” he suggested, diffidently fingering a muslin specimen that Marsali had brought me. “Only until it grows out a bit?”

  “I don’t suppose I bloody would.”

  Shocked and self-conscious, she is supported by the realization that Jamie still loves her, and she gathers sufficient strength to ask him how the residents of the Ridge are faring. Mrs. Bug has her own idea of what constitutes proper care of an invalid and brings Claire food and gossip—telling her that the local boys tried to drown Henri-Christian, on the theory that he was the spawn of Satan, but that the baby was saved by Mr. Roger, who pulled him out of the water.

  “I was just in time to see it,” Jamie informed me, grinning at the memory. “And then to see Roger Mac rise out o’ the water like a triton, wi’ duckweed streaming from his hair, blood runnin’ from his nose, and the wee lad clutched tight in his arms. A terrible sight, he was.”

  The miscreant boys had followed the basket’s career, yelling along the banks, but were now struck dumb. One of them moved to flee, the others starting up like a flight of pigeons, but Roger had pointed an awful finger at them and bellowed, “Sheas!” in a voice loud enough to be heard over the racket of the creek.

  Such was the force of his presence, they did stay, frozen in terror.

  Holding them with his glare, Roger had waded almost to the shore. There, he squatted and cupped a handful of water, which he poured over the head of the shrieking baby—who promptly quit shrieking.

  “I baptize thee, Henri-Christian,” Roger had bellowed, in his hoarse, cracked voice. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost! D’ye hear me, wee bastards? His name is Christian! He belongs to the Lord! Trouble him again, ye lot of scabs, and Satan will pop up and drag ye straight down screaming—TO HELL!”

  ***

  “One of the lads asked me was it true, what Mr. Roger said, about the wean belonging to the Lord? I told him I certainly wouldna argue with Mr. Roger about that—but whoever else he belonged to, Henri-Christian belongs to me, as well, and best they should remember it.”

  The story has a more somber side, though—one Jamie tells her reluctantly. Fergus tried to kill himself, three days before, and was narrowly rescued by Jamie.

  “But…how could he?” I said, distressed. “To leave Marsali, and the children—how?”

  Jamie looked down, hands braced on his knees, and sighed. The window was open, and a soft breeze came in, lifting the hairs on the crown of his head like tiny flames.

  “He thought they would do better without him,” he said flatly. “If he was dead, Marsali could wed again—find a man who could care for her and the weans. Provide for them. Protect wee Henri.”

  “He thinks—thought—he couldn’t?”

  Jamie glanced sharply at me.

  “Sassenach,” he said, “he kens damn well he can’t.”

  Jamie’s answer to the difficulty is to send Fergus, Marsali, and the children away—to Cross Creek, Wilmington, or New Bern, where Fergus has a chance of finding self-respect and more security for his unusual son.

  Jamie has accompanied Major MacDonald down from the Ridge and on the way meets five men on horseback—one of them Richard Brown. The men are members of the Committee of Correspondence, bound for a meeting in Halifax—and extremely suspicious of Jamie’s political sympathies, owing to his having saved the life of Fogarty Simms, the printer from Cross Creek.

  One of the strangers spat in the road.

  “Not so innocent, if that’s Fogarty Simms you’re speakin’ of. Little Tory pissant,” he added as an afterthought.

  “That’s the fellow,” Green said, and spat in agreement. “The committee in Cross Creek set out to teach him a lesson; seems Mr. Fraser here was in disagreement. Quite a scene it was, from what I hear,” he drawled, leaning back a little in his saddle to survey Jamie from his superior height. “Like I said, Mr. Fraser—you ain’t all that popular, right this minute.”

  ***

  Well, he’d known it was coming. Had now and then tried to imagine the circumstances of his declaration, in situations ranging from the vaingloriously heroic to the openly dangerous, but as usual in such matters, God’s sense of humor trumped all imagination. And so he found himself taking that final step into irrevocable and public commitment to the Rebel cause—just incidentally being required to ally himself with a deadly enemy in the process—standing alone in a dusty road, with a uniformed officer of the Crown squatting in the bushes directly behind him, breeches round his ankles.

  “I am for liberty,” he said, in a tone indicating mild astonishment that there could be any question regarding his position.

  The men don’t believe him, and the discussion goes downhill rapidly, with accusations of Jamie’s being a Loyalist owing to his connections with River Run, and reaches the point of threatened violence.

  “Wait!” Wherry drew himself up, trying to quell them with a hand, though Jamie could have told him he was several minutes past the point where such an attempt might have had any effect. “You cannot lay violent hands upon—”

  “Can’t we, though?” Brown grinned like a death’s head, eyes fixed on Jamie, and began to undo the leather quirt coiled and fastened to his saddle. “No tar to hand, alas. But a good beating, say, and send ’em both squealing home to the Governor stark naked—that’d answer.”

  The second stranger laughed, and spat again, so the gob landed juicily at Jamie’s feet.

  “Aye, that’ll do. Hear you held off a mob by yourself in Cross Creek, Fraser—only five to two now, how you like them odds?”

  Jamie liked them fine. Dropping the reins he held, he turned and flung himself between the two horses, screeching and slapping hard at their flanks, then dived headlong into the brush at the roadside, scrabbling through roots and stones on hands and knees as fast as he could.

  In the confusion, Jamie escapes, collecting Major MacDonald as he passes through the wood.

  “Verra unfortunate,” MacDonald observed thoughtfully at one point. “That they should have met us together. D’ye think it’s dished your chances of worming your way into their councils? I should give my left ball to have an eye and an ear in that meeting they spoke of, I’ll tell ye that for nothing!”

  With a dim sense of wonder, Jamie realized that having made his momentous declaration, overheard by the man whose cause he sought to betray, and then nearly killed by the new allies whose side he sought to uphold—neither side had believed him.

  “D’ye ever wonder what it sounds like when God laughs, Donald?” he asked thoughtfully.

  MacDonald pursed his lips and glanced at the horizon, where dark clouds swelled just beyond the shoulder of the mountain.

  “Like thunder, I imagine,” he said. “D’ye not think so?”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “No. I think it’s a verra small, wee sound indeed.”

  HAVING HEARD THAT Tom Christie has also been ill, Claire goes to see him as soon as she’s up and about. He is shocked at her appearance and at seeing her in a cap—he being an outspoken critic of her “wanton” hair.

  MEANWHILE, JAMIE HAS brought thirty muskets to Bird-who-sings-in-the-morning—along with Hiram Crombie, who is almost as bemused by the Indians as they are by him.

  Penstemon’s nostrils flared delicately; Crombie was sweating with nervousness, and smelled like a goat. He bowed earnestly, and presented Bird with the good knife he had brought as a present, slowly reciting the complimentary speech he had committed to memory. Reasonably well, too, Jamie thought; he’d mispronounced only a couple of words.

  “I come to b-bring you great joy,” he finished, stammering and sweating.

  Bird looked at Crombie—small, stringy, and dripping wet—for a long, inscrutable moment, then back at Jamie.
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  “You’re a funny man, Bear-Killer,” he said with resignation. “Let us eat!”

  “It is good for men to eat as brothers,” Hiram observed to Standing Bear, in his halting Tsalagi. Or rather, tried to. And after all, Jamie reflected, feeling his ribs creak under the strain, it was really a very minor difference between “as brothers” and “their brothers.”

  Standing Bear gave Hiram a thoughtful look, and edged slightly farther away from him.

  Bird observed this, and after a moment’s silence, turned to Jamie.

  “You’re a very funny man, Bear-Killer,” he repeated, shaking his head. “You win.”

  Upon his return to the Ridge, Jamie sends a letter to the superintendent of the Southern Department, resigning his commission as Indian agent.

  PART 9: THE BONES OF TIME

  Jamie takes one of the remaining gems and gives it to Major MacDonald, to use in negotiating for the purchase of a printing shop in New Bern. MacDonald observes that he’d heard that Jamie had a cache of gems—a disquieting bit of gossip to have loose.

  The deal is made, though, and Fergus and his family depart—to the great distress of Jem and Germain, who are fast friends.

  Ian invites Brianna to go hunting with him, but it becomes apparent fairly quickly that he has something else in mind. It is a journey of several days before they reach what he means to show her—the bones of a huge animal, half buried in a cliff, exposed by a fall of rock.

  “A mammoth,” she said, and found that she was whispering, too. The sun had passed its zenith; already the bottom of the creekbed lay in shadow. Light struck the stained curve of ancient ivory, and threw the vault of the high-crowned skull that held it into sharp relief. The skull was fixed in the soil at a slight angle, the single visible tusk rising high, the eye socket black as mystery.

  The shiver came again, and she hunched her shoulders. Easy to feel that it might at any moment wrench itself free of the clay and turn that massive head toward them, empty-eyed, clods of dirt raining from tusks and bony shoulders as it shook itself and began to walk, the ground vibrating as long toes struck and sank in the muddy soil.

  “That’s what it’s called—mammoth? Aye, well…it is verra big.” Ian’s voice dispelled the illusion of incipient movement, and she was able finally to take her eyes off it—though she felt she must glance back, every second or so, to be sure it was still there.

  ON THE WAY, camping at night, Ian has told Brianna a great deal about his time with the Mohawk and about his lost wife, Emily—about the loss of the children he gave her and her eventual turning away from him out of sorrow, to marry another man, Sun Elk. And now he’s brought Brianna to see the mammoth.

  “I needed ye to tell me, aye? Whether that’s what it is, or no. Because if it was, then perhaps what I’ve been thinking is wrong.”

  “It’s not,” she assured him. “But what on earth have you been thinking?”

  “About God,” he said, surprising her again. He licked his lips, unsure how to go on.

  “Yeksa’a—the child. I didna have her christened,” he said. “I couldna. Or perhaps I could—ye can do it yourself, ken, if there’s no priest. But I hadna the courage to try. I—never saw her. They’d wrapped her already…. They wouldna have liked it, if I’d tried to…” His voice died away.

  “Yeksa’a,” she said softly. “Was that your—your daughter’s name?”

  He shook his head, his mouth twisting wryly.

  “It only means ‘wee girl.’ The Kahnyen’kehaka dinna give a name to a child when it’s born. Not until later. If…” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “If it lives. They wouldna think of naming a child unborn.”

  “But you did?” she asked gently.

  He raised his head and took a breath that had a damp sound to it, like wet bandages pulled from a fresh wound.

  “Iseabaìl,” he said, and she knew it was the first—perhaps would be the only—time he’d spoken it aloud. “Had it been a son, I would ha’ called him Jamie.” He glanced at her, with the shadow of a smile. “Only in my head, ken.”

  He let out all his breath then with a sigh and put his face down upon his knees, back hunched.

  “What I am thinking,” he said after a moment, his voice much too controlled, “is this. Was it me?”

  “Ian! You mean your fault that the baby died? How could it be?”

  “I left,” he said simply, straightening up. “Turned away. Stopped being a Christian, being Scots. They took me to the stream, scrubbed me wi’ sand to take away the white blood. They gave me my name—Okwaho’kenha—and said I was Mohawk. But I wasna, not really.”

  He sighed deeply again, and she put a hand on his back, feeling the bumps of his backbone press through the leather of his shirt. He didn’t eat nearly enough, she thought.

  “But I wasna what I had been, either,” he went on, sounding almost matter-of-fact. “I tried to be what they wanted, ken? So I left off praying to God or the Virgin Mother, or Saint Bride. I listened to what Emily said, when she’d tell me about her gods, the spirits that dwell in the trees and all. And when I went to the sweat lodge wi’ the men, or sat by the hearth and heard the stories…they seemed as real to me as Christ and His saints ever had.”

  He turned his head and looked up at her suddenly, half-bewildered, half-defiant.

  “I am the Lord thy God,” he said. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me. But I did, no? That’s mortal sin, is it not?”

  IAN IS DESPERATE at thought of his dead daughter, adrift in limbo, unfound. Brianna holds him tightly against her and prays, calling on her father Frank.

  “Daddy,” she said, and her voice broke on the word, but she held her cousin hard. “Daddy, I need you.” Her voice sounded small, and pathetically unsure. But there was no other help to be had.

  “I need you to find Ian’s little girl,” she said, as firmly as she could, trying to summon her father’s face, to see him there among the shifting leaves at the clifftop. “Find her, please. Hold her in your arms, and make sure that she’s safe. Take—please take care of her.”

  She stopped, feeling obscurely that she should say something else, something more ceremonious. Make the sign of the cross? Say “amen”?

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she said softly, and cried as though her father were newly dead, and she bereft, orphaned, lost, and crying in the night. Ian’s arms were wrapped around her, and they clung tight together, squeezing hard, the warmth of the late sun heavy on their heads.

  WHILE CLAIRE is making a black pudding, Ronnie Sinclair arrives, bearing a load of barrels for the whisky-making and a letter, meant for “the healer,” bearing a cryptic message: YU CUM.

  The note is from Phaedre, Jocasta’s body servant, and in response to the mysterious plea, Jamie and Claire ride down from the Ridge to find out what is happening at River Run.

  “Betrayals”—They arrive to discover that Phaedre has run away, and they learn from Jocasta that Phaedre is in fact the daughter of Hector Cameron and the slave Betty. Jocasta professes complete bafflement as to what might have made Phaedre leave—particularly after sending that cryptic message to Claire.

  Jamie has no idea, either—but he and Claire go to talk to Duncan. Duncan confesses that, quite by accident, he discovered that his impotence was not purely physical.

  “But I thought you couldn’t—” I began.

  “Oh, I couldna,” he assured me hastily. “Only at night, like, dreaming. But not waking, not since I had the accident. Perhaps it was being so early i’ the morning; my cock thought I was still asleep.”

  Jamie made a low Scottish noise expressing considerable doubt as to this supposition, but urged Duncan to continue, with a certain amount of impatience.

  Phaedre had taken notice in her turn, it transpired.

  “She was only sorry for me,” Duncan said frankly. “I could tell as much. But she put her hand on me, soft. So soft,” he repeated, almost inaudibly.

  He had been sitting on his bed—and ha
d gone on sitting there in dumb amazement, as she took away the breakfast tray, lifted his nightshirt, climbed on the bed with her skirts neatly tucked above her round brown thighs, and with great tenderness and gentleness, had welcomed back his manhood.

  Knowing Jocasta as they do, this casts a different light on the matter for Jamie and Claire. She could not have sold the girl, as legally Phaedre is Duncan’s property. But Jocasta is a MacKenzie of Leoch, and…

  “Ulysses,” I said, with certainty, and he nodded reluctantly. Ulysses was not only Jocasta’s eyes, but her hands, as well. I didn’t think he would have killed Phaedre at his mistress’s command—but if Jocasta had poisoned the girl, for instance, Ulysses might certainly have helped to dispose of the body.

  I felt an odd air of unreality—even with what I knew of the MacKenzie family, calmly discussing the possibility of Jamie’s aged aunt having murdered someone…and yet…I did know the MacKenzies.

  There is nothing they can do for Phaedre, save pray for her. Snow will fly soon in the mountains; they have to return to the Ridge. But just in case, Jamie goes first to speak to his aunt.

  “Aunt,” he said to Jocasta matter-of-factly, “I should take it verra much amiss were any harm to come to Duncan.”

  She stiffened, fingers halting in their work.

  “Why should any harm come to him?” she asked, lifting her chin.

  Jamie didn’t reply at once, but stood regarding her, not without sympathy. Then he leaned down, so that she could feel his presence close, his mouth near her ear.

  “I know, Aunt,” he said, softly. “And if ye dinna wish anyone else to share that knowledge…then I think I shall find Duncan in good health when I return.”

  She sat as though turned to salt. Jamie stood up, nodding toward the door, and we took our leave. I glanced back from the hallway, and saw her still sitting like a statue, face as white as the linen in her hands and the little balls of colored thread all fallen from her lap, unraveling across the polished floor.