PART 9: “THIG CRIOCH AIR AN T-SAOGHAL ACH MAIRIDH CEOL AGUS GAOL.” (“THE WORLD MAY COME TO AN END, BUT LOVE AND MUSIC WILL ENDURE.”)
The Frasers, at last, are coming home. As they climb higher and higher into the mountains, Claire feels herself surrounded by the scents and sights of the wilderness, and the feel of home rises in her blood. As they come to the head of the pass into Fraser’s Ridge, they find Joseph Wemyss, an old friend and tenant, waiting for them, with his eldest grandson, Rodney; Joseph and Rodney welcome the Frasers and share the news of the Ridge and its people as they walk on, past the places they have known, past the place where the Big House once stood, before it burned.
Just before we came to the spot where the trail ended above the clearing, Jamie and Mr. Wemyss stopped, waiting for Rodney and me to catch up. With a shy smile, Mr. Wemyss kissed my hand and then took Rodney’s, saying, “Come along, Roddy, you can be first to tell your mam that Himself and his lady have come back!”
Jamie took my hand and squeezed it hard. He was flushed from the walk, and even more from excitement; the color ran right down into the open neck of his shirt, turning his skin a beautiful rosy bronze.
“I’ve brought ye home, Sassenach,” he said, his voice a little husky. “It willna be the same—and I canna say how things will be now—but I’ve kept my word.”
He has, and nothing else seems needed. But something else is given, nonetheless:
My throat was so choked that I could barely whisper “Thank you.” We stood for a long moment, clasped tight together, summoning up the strength to go around that last corner and look at what had been, and what might be.
Something brushed the hem of my skirt, and I looked down, expecting that a late cone from the big spruce we were standing by had fallen.
A large gray cat looked up at me with big, calm eyes of celadon green and dropped a fat, hairy, very dead wood rat at my feet.
“Oh, God!” I said, and burst into tears.
The Frasers and their entourage settle quickly into the life of the North Carolina mountains: there’s much to be done before summer fades and the autumn comes. A new Big House to raise, food to gather, hunt, and preserve—and a few small, necessary things.
Fanny’s frenulum, for one. The frenulum, a small band of elastic tissue that fastens the tongue to the floor of the mouth, is what’s causing Fanny to be tongue-tied. Claire luckily can put this right with a tiny snip of scissors—and does, freeing Fanny and welcoming her to her new home and family.
But not everything can be gathered or made. Claire and Jenny, with Ian, Rachel (very pregnant), and Germain, make the four-day trip to Beardsley’s trading post, to buy necessities like salt and needles and luxuries like barley sugar and pickles.
But a trading post provides more than goods for sale or barter; it’s a gathering place, where one might meet friends—or some long-lost echo of the past. Ian meets Mrs. Sylvie, a prostitute of his acquaintance, along with her two young bodyguards.
He’d thought they were boys when he’d met them: a pair of feral Dutch orphans named—they said—Herman and Vermin, and they thought their last name was Kuykendall. In the event, they’d turned out to be in actuality Hermione and Ermintrude. He’d found them a temporary refuge with…oh, Christ.
“God, please, no!” he said in Gaelic, causing Rachel to look at him in alarm.
Surely they weren’t still with…but they were. He saw the back of a very familiar head—and a still more familiar arse—over by the pickle barrel.
He glanced round quickly, but there was no way out. The Kuykendalls were approaching fast. He took a deep breath, commended his soul to God, and turned to his wife.
“Do ye by chance recall once tellin’ me that ye didna want to hear about every woman I’d bedded?”
“I do,” she said, giving him a deeply quizzical look. “Why?”
“Ah. Well…” He breathed deep and got it out just in time. “Ye said ye did want me to tell ye if we should ever meet anyone that I…er—”
“Ian Murray?” said Mrs. Sylvie, turning round. She came toward him, a look of pleasure on her rather plain, bespectacled face.
“Her,” Ian said hastily to Rachel, jerking his thumb in Mrs. Sylvie’s direction before turning to the lady.
“Mrs. Sylvie!” he said heartily, seizing her by both hands in case she might try to kiss him, as she had occasionally been wont to do upon their meeting. “I’m that pleased to see ye! And even more pleased to present ye to my…er…wife.”
Ian is not the only one surprised by an old acquaintance, though. As Claire and Jenny stroll the grounds, considering the purchase of chickens or a couple of young goats, Claire sees a man.
At first, I had no idea who he was. None. But the sight of the big, slow-moving man froze me in my tracks and my stomach curled up in instant panic.
No, I thought. No. He’s dead; they’re all dead.
He was a sloppily built man, with sloping shoulders and a protruding stomach that strained his threadbare waistcoat, but big. Big. I felt again the sense of sudden dread, of a big shadow coming out of the night beside me, nudging me, then rolling over me like a thundercloud, crushing me into the dirt and pine needles.
Martha.
A cold wind swept over me, in spite of the warm sunshine I stood in.
“Martha,” he’d said. He’d called me by his dead wife’s name and wept into my hair when he’d finished.
This is the man who raped her during her abduction nearly six years before—a man she thought had been killed, along with the other kidnappers. Finding him alive, well—and right in front of her—is more than she can deal with. But deal with it she does.
I was not going to be bloody sick. I wasn’t. With that decision made, I calmed a little. I hadn’t let him or his companions kill my spirit at the time; whyever would I let him harm me now?
He moved away from the pigs, and I followed him. I wasn’t sure why I was following him but felt a strong compulsion to do so. I wasn’t afraid of him; logically, there was no reason to be. At the same time, my unreasoning body still felt the echoes of that night, of his flesh and fingers, and would have liked to run away. I wasn’t having that.
She follows the man, steeling herself, becoming accustomed to the sight of him—thinking, all the time, what will happen if she tells Jamie that one man escaped. She concludes that she can live with the knowledge of this man; he’s no threat to her now, and she doesn’t want to be responsible for Jamie having to kill the man—she knows he won’t consider any other form of action—and risk possible repercussions, or spiritual damage, for that matter.
But Claire has a glass face, and a sharp-eyed sister-in-law. On the way back, Jenny and Claire are separated for a while from Ian and Rachel, and Jenny worms the truth out of Claire.
She sipped and nodded approvingly. “Who was the dirty fat lumpkin that scairt ye at Beardsley’s?”
I choked on the whisky, swallowed it the wrong way, and nearly coughed my lungs out in consequence. Jenny put down the flask, kirtled up her skirts, and waded into the creek, sousing her hankie in the cold water; she handed it to me, then cupped water in her hand and poured a little into my mouth.
“Lucky there’s plenty of water, as ye said,” she remarked. “Here, have a bit more.” I nodded, eyes streaming, but pulled up my skirts, got down on my knees, and drank for myself, pausing to breathe between mouthfuls, until I stopped wheezing.
“I wasna in any doubt, mind,” Jenny said, watching this performance. “But if I had been, I wouldn’t be now. Who is he?”
“I don’t bloody know,” I said crossly, climbing back on my rock. Jenny wasn’t one to be daunted by tones of voice, though, and merely raised one gull-wing-shaped brow.
CLAIRE IS OBLIGED to explain the circumstances, and Jenny understands. She tells Claire about one of her daughters and how they dealt with an instance of rape—in that case, her daughter chose to keep the secret and bear the resulting child as her husband’s, because the rapist was h
er husband’s brother, and to do otherwise would tear the entire family apart, as well as risk her husband’s life. This, she observes, is rather different.
I thought about it, after everyone had rolled up in their blankets and begun snoring that night. Well…I hadn’t stopped thinking about it since I’d seen the man. But in light of the story that Jenny had told me, my thoughts began to clarify, much as throwing an egg into a pot of coffee will settle the grounds.
The notion of saying nothing was of course the first one to come to my mind and was still my intent. The only difficulty—well, there were two, to be honest. But the first one was that, irritating as it was to be told so repeatedly, I couldn’t deny the fact that I had a glass face. If anything was seriously troubling me, the people I lived with immediately began glancing at me sideways, tiptoeing exaggeratedly around me—or, in Jamie’s case, demanding bluntly to know what the matter was.
Jenny had done much the same thing, though she hadn’t pressed me for details of my experience. Quite plainly, she’d guessed the outlines of it, though, or she wouldn’t have chosen to tell me Maggie’s story. It occurred to me belatedly to wonder whether Jamie had told her anything about Hodgepile’s attack and its aftermath.
The underlying difficulty, though, was my own response to meeting the dirty fat lumpkin. I snorted every time I repeated the description to myself, but it actually helped. He was a man, and not a very prepossessing one. Not a monster. Not…not bloody worth making a fuss about. God knew how he’d come to join Hodgepile’s band—I supposed that most criminal gangs were largely composed of feckless idiots, come to that.
And…little as I wanted to relive that experience…I did. He hadn’t come to me with any intent of hurting me, in fact hadn’t hurt me (which was not to say that he hadn’t crushed me with his weight, forced my thighs apart, and stuck his cock into me…).
I unclenched my teeth, drew a deep breath, and started over.
He’d come to me out of opportunity—and need.
“Martha,” he’d said, sobbing, his tears and snot warm on my neck. “Martha, I loved you so.”
Could I forgive him on those grounds? Put aside the unpleasantness of what he’d done to me and see him only as the pathetic creature that he was?
If I could—would that stop him living in my mind, a constant burr under the blanket of my thoughts?
I put back my head, looking up at the deep black sky swimming with hot stars. If you knew they were really balls of flaming gas, you could imagine them as van Gogh saw them, without difficulty…and looking into that illuminated void, you understood why people have always looked up into the sky when talking to God. You need to feel the immensity of something very much bigger than yourself, and there it is—immeasurably vast, and always near at hand. Covering you.
Help me, I said silently.
I never talked to Jamie about Jack Randall. But I knew from the few things he told me—and the disjointed things he said in the worst of his dreams—that this was how he had chosen to survive. He’d forgiven Jack Randall. Over and over. But he was a stubborn man; he could do it. A thousand times, and still one more.
Help me, I said, and felt tears trickle down my temples, into my hair. Please. Help me.
For a time, Claire’s resolve works. Aided by the distractions of life—such as pinworm infestations and the work of building the new house—she’s able to forgive, and forgive, and sometimes to forget. But Jamie knows her far too well.
“THERE’S NOTHING WRONG,” I said, for probably the tenth time. I picked at a scab of bark still clinging to the timber I sat on. “It’s perfectly all right. Really.”
Jamie was standing in front of me, the cove and the clouded sky bright behind him, his face shadowed.
“Sassenach,” he said mildly. “I’m a great deal more stubborn than you are, and ye ken that fine. Now, I know something upset ye when ye went to Beardsley’s place, and I know ye dinna want to tell me about it. Sometimes I ken ye need to fettle your mind about a matter before ye speak, but you’ve had time and more to do that—and I see that whatever it is is worse than I thought, or ye’d have said by now.”
Well aware that Jamie can’t let such a matter lie, Claire asks him instead not to force her to tell him, to accept that it’s her responsibility to forgive injustice—she thinks she can—and leave things there.
He unwillingly agrees—for the moment—and things seem to be at rest. But as Jenny warned Claire during their conversation, “Ye canna have been marrit to a Hieland man all these years and not ken how deep they can hate.”
THE NEXT EVENING, Jamie and Claire come up to their building site, for a bit of privacy. They make tender love to each other and fall asleep enmeshed—but when Claire wakes in the morning—
I BLOODY KNEW. From the moment I woke to birdsong and a cold quilt beside me, I knew. Jamie often rose before dawn, for hunting, fishing, or travel—but he invariably touched me before he left, leaving me with a word or a kiss. We’d lived long enough to know how chancy life could be and how swiftly people could be parted forever. We’d never spoken of it or made a formal custom of it, but we almost never parted without some brief token of affection.
And now he’d gone off in the dark, without a word.
“You bloody, bloody man!” I said, and thumped the ground with my fist in frustration.
The birth of Rachel’s baby—a boy—is a considerable distraction, and when Jamie returns three days later with a large buck behind his saddle, Claire is able to greet him with a fair show of equanimity. But neither has ever been able to lie to the other, even by omission, and an honest conversation ensues:
“And if ye could forgive him, he needn’t die, ye’re saying? That’s like a judge lettin’ a murderer go free, because his victim’s family forgave him. Or an enemy soldier sent off wi’ all his weapons.”
“I am not a state at war, and you are not my army!”
He began to speak, then stopped short, searching my face, his eyes intent.
“Am I not?” he said quietly.
I opened my mouth to reply but found I couldn’t. The birds had come back, and a gang of house finches chittered at the foot of a big fir that grew at the side of the clearing.
“You are,” I said reluctantly, and, standing up, wrapped my arms around him. He was warm from his work, and the scars on his back were fine as threads under my fingers. “I wish you didn’t have to be.”
“Aye, well,” he said, and held me close. After a bit, we walked hand in hand to the biggest pile of barked timber and sat down. I could feel him thinking but was content to wait until he had formed what he wanted to say. It didn’t take him long. He turned to me and took my hands, formal as a man about to say his wedding vows.
“Ye lost your parents young, mo nighean donn, and wandered about the world, rootless. Ye loved Frank”—his mouth compressed for an instant, but I thought he was unconscious of it—“and of course ye love Brianna and Roger Mac and the weans…but, Sassenach—I am the true home of your heart, and I know that.”
He lifted my hands to his mouth and kissed my upturned palms, one and then the other, his breath warm and his beard stubble soft on my fingers.
“I have loved others, and I do love many, Sassenach—but you alone hold all my heart, whole in your hands,” he said softly. “And you know that.”
They work in close amity through the day, building, and sit down in the afternoon, surveying the Ridge below them and resting in the sense of being home at last. On the far side of the clearing below, four people emerge from the head of the wagon road, on foot. A tall man, a tall woman, and two children, one a boy with bright-red hair.
“Look, the lad’s got red hair,” Jamie said, smiling and raising his chin to point. “He minds me of Jem.”
“So he does.” Curious now, I got up and rummaged in my basket, finding the bit of silk in which I kept my spectacles when not wearing them. I put them on and turned, pleased as I always was to see fine details spring suddenly into being. Slightl
y less pleased to see that what I had thought was a scale of bark on the timber near where I’d been sitting was in fact an enormous centipede, enjoying the shade.
I turned my attention back to the newcomers, though; they’d stopped—the little girl had dropped something. Her dolly—I could see the doll’s hair, a splotch of color on the ground, even redder than the little boy’s. The man was wearing a pack, and the woman had a large bag over one shoulder. She set it down and bent to pick up the doll, brushing it off and handing it back to her daughter.
The woman turned then to say something to her husband, throwing out an arm to point to something—the Higginses’ cabin, I thought. The man put both hands to his mouth and shouted, and the wind carried his words to us, faint but clearly audible, called out in a strong, cracked voice.
“Hello, the house!”
I was on my feet, and Jamie stood and grabbed my hand, hard enough to bruise my fingers.
Movement at the door of the cabin, and a small figure that I recognized as Amy Higgins appeared. The tall woman pulled off her hat and waved it, her long red hair streaming out like a banner in the wind.
“Hello, the house!” she called, laughing.
Then I was flying down the hill, with Jamie just before me, arms flung wide, the two of us flying together on that same wind.
THE END
THE LORD JOHN SERIES
always have mixed feelings about referring to these books as a separate “series.” The Lord John novels and novellas are very much an integral part of the bigger, overall Outlander story. At the same time, these books are undeniably shaped and focused differently than are the “Jamie and Claire” (to simplify the references) Big Books.
As the name suggests, Lord John Grey is the central figure (though not always the only one) in these stories, and for various reasons his novels are structured roughly as historical mysteries. He isn’t himself a time traveler, nor does he—at this point in his career, at least—believe in any such far-fetched notions, so his books don’t have the science-fiction component1 that the Big Books do. They do, however, tend to have disconcerting whiffs of the supernatural; Lord John is one of those very rational men whose sense of logic and order attracts things likely to disturb rationality, logic, and order.
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 37