The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  “I told him not. He was in Hillsborough during the troubles there. Best he should wait a bit; then if Hayes should ask, he can swear honestly there’s no man here who took part in the riots.” He looked up and smiled, without humor. “There won’t be, come morning.”

  I watched his hands, large and capable, wringing out the rinsed clout. The scars on his right hand were usually almost invisible, but they stood out now, ragged white lines against his cold-reddened skin. The whole business made me mildly uneasy, though there seemed no direct connection with us.

  For the most part, I could think of Governor Tryon with no more than a faint sense of edginess; he was, after all, safely tucked away in his nice new palace in New Bern, separated from our tiny settlement on Fraser’s Ridge by three hundred miles of coastal towns, inland plantations, pine forest, piedmont, trackless mountains, and sheer, howling wilderness. With all the other things he had to worry about, such as the self-styled “Regulators” who had terrorized Hillsborough, and the corrupt sheriffs and judges who had provoked the terror, I hardly thought he would have time to spare a thought for us and our peaceable existence.

  The uncomfortable fact remained that Jamie held title to a large grant of land in the North Carolina mountains as the gift of Governor Tryon—and Tryon in turn held one small but important fact tucked away in his vest pocket; Jamie was a Catholic. And Royal grants of land were made only to Protestants, by law.

  Given the small numbers of Catholics in the colony, and the lack of organization among them—there were no Catholic churches, no resident Catholic priests; Father Donahue, who would perform the weddings this afternoon, had made the arduous journey down from Baltimore—the question of religion was rarely an issue. Jamie’s aunt, Jocasta Cameron, and her late husband had been influential among the Scottish community here for so long that no one would have thought of questioning their religious background, and I thought it likely that few of the Scots with whom we had been celebrating all week knew that we were Papists.

  They were, however, likely to notice quite soon. Bree and Roger, who had been handfast for a year, were to be married by the priest today, along with two other Catholic couples from Barbecue Creek—and with Jocasta and Duncan Innes.

  “Archie Hayes,” I said suddenly. “Is he a Catholic?”

  Jamie hung the wet clout from a nearby branch and shook water from his hands.

  “I havena asked him,” he said. “But I shouldna think so. That is, his father was not; I should be surprised if he was—and him an officer.”

  “True.” The disadvantages of Scottish birth, poverty, and being an ex-Jacobite were sufficiently staggering; amazing enough that Hayes had overcome these to rise to his present position, without the additional burden of the taint of Papistry.

  What was troubling me, though, was not the thought of Leftenant Hayes and his men; it was Jamie. Outwardly, he was calm and assured as ever, with that faint smile always hiding in the corner of his mouth. But I knew him very well; I had seen the two stiff fingers of his right hand—maimed in an English prison—twitch against the side of his leg as he traded jokes and stories with Hayes the night before.

  He had come late to our makeshift bed, and had lain sleepless beside me, tossing and turning with a restlessness due to something more than the discomfort of sleeping on cedar boughs and heaped-up leaves. Even now, I could see the thin line that formed between his brows when he was troubled, and it wasn’t concern over what he was doing.

  “… a Presbyterian,” he was saying. He glanced over at me with a wry smile. “Like wee Roger.”

  The memory that had niggled at me earlier dropped suddenly into place.

  “You knew that,” I said. “You knew Roger wasn’t a Catholic. You saw him baptize that child in Snaketown, when we… took him from the Indians.” Too late, I saw the shadow cross his face, and bit my tongue. When we took Roger—and left in his place Jamie’s dearly loved nephew Ian.

  He smiled, though, pushing away the thought of Ian.

  “Aye, I did,” he said.

  “But Bree—”

  “She’d marry the lad if he were a Hottentot,” Jamie interrupted. “Anyone can see that. And I canna say I’d object ower-much to wee Roger if he were a Hottentot,” he added, rather to my surprise.

  “You wouldn’t?”

  Jamie shrugged, and stepped over the tiny creek to my side, wiping wet hands on the end of his plaid.

  “He’s a braw lad, and he’s kind. Ye’ll ken he’s taken the wean as his own and said no word to the lass about it. It’s no every man would do so.”

  I glanced down involuntarily at Jemmy. I tried not to think of it, but could not help now and then searching his bluntly amiable features for any trace that might reveal his true paternity. He was gnawing his fist at the moment, with a ferocious scowl of concentration, and with his soft fuzz of red-gold plush, looked like no one so much as Jamie himself.

  “Mm. So why all the insistence on having Roger vetted by a priest?”

  “Well, they’ll be married in any case,” he said logically. “I wanted the wee lad baptized a Catholic, though.” He laid a large hand gently on Jemmy’s head, thumb smoothing the tiny red brows. “So if I made a bit of a fuss about Roger, I thought they’d be pleased to agree about a ruaidh here, aye?”

  I laughed, and pulled a fold of blanket up around Jemmy’s ears.

  “And I thought Brianna had you figured out!”

  “So does she,” he said, with a grin. He bent suddenly and kissed me.

  His mouth was soft and very warm. He tasted of coffee and honey, and he smelt strongly of woodsmoke and unwashed male, with just the faintest trace of effluvium of diaper.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I said with approval. “Do it again.”

  The wood around us was still, in the way of woods. No bird, no beast, just the sough of leaves above and the rush of water underfoot. Constant movement, constant sound—and at the center of it all, a perfect peace. There were a good many people on the mountain, and most of them not that far away—yet just here, just now, we might have been alone on Jupiter.

  I opened my eyes and sighed, tasting honey. Jamie smiled at me, and brushed a fallen yellow leaf from my hair. The baby lay in my arms, a heavy, warm weight, the center of the universe.

  Neither of us spoke, not wishing to disturb the stillness. It was like being at the tip of a spinning top, I thought—a whirl of events and people going on all round, and a step in one direction or another would plunge us back into that spinning frenzy, but here at the very center—there was peace.

  I reached up and brushed a scatter of maple seeds from his shoulder. He seized my hand, and brought it to his mouth with a sudden fierceness that startled me. And yet his lips were tender, the tip of his tongue warm on the fleshy mound at the base of my thumb—the mount of Venus, it’s called, love’s seat.

  He raised his head, and I felt the sudden chill there, where the ancient scar showed white as bone. A letter J, cut in the skin, his mark on me.

  He laid his hand against my face, and I pressed it there with my own, as though I could feel the faded C against the cold skin of my cheek. Neither of us spoke, but the pledge was made, as we had made it once before, in a place of sanctuary, our feet on a scrap of bedrock in the shifting sands of threatened war.

  It was not near; not yet. I heard it coming, in the sound of drums and proclamation, saw it in the glint of steel, knew the fear of it in heart and bone when I looked in Jamie’s eyes.

  The chill had gone, and hot blood throbbed in my hand as though to split the ancient scar and spill my heart’s blood for him once again. It would come, and I could not stop it.

  But this time, I wouldn’t leave him.

  BLACK PUDDING

  I was in the middle of a black pudding when Ronnie Sinclair appeared in the yard, carrying two small whisky casks. Several more were bound in a neatly corrugated cascade down his back, which made him look like some exotic form of caterpillar, balanced precariously upright in mid-pu
pation. It was a chilly day, but he was sweating freely from the long walk uphill—and cursing in similar vein.

  “Why in the name of Bride did Himself build the frigging house up here in the godforsaken clouds?” he demanded without ceremony. “Why not where a bloody wagon could reach the yard?” He set the casks down carefully, then ducked his head through the straps of the harness to shed his wooden carapace. He sighed in relief, rubbing at his shoulders where the straps had dug.

  I ignored the rhetorical questions, and kept stirring, tilting my head toward the house in invitation.

  “There’s fresh coffee made,” I said. “And bannocks with honey, too.” My own stomach recoiled slightly at the thought of eating. Once spiced, stuffed, boiled, and fried, black pudding was delicious. The earlier stages, involving as they did arm-deep manipulations in a barrel of semicoagulated pig’s blood, were substantially less appetizing.

  Sinclair, though, looked happier at mention of food. He wiped a sleeve across his sweating forehead and nodded to me, turning toward the house. Then he stopped and turned back.

  “Ah. I’d forgot, missus. I’ve a wee message for yourself, as well.” He patted gingerly at his chest, then lower, probing around his ribs until he at length found what he was looking for and extracted it from the layers of his sweat-soaked clothing. He pulled out a damp wad of paper and held it out to me in expectation, ignoring the fact that my right arm was coated with blood nearly to the shoulder, and the left in scarcely better case.

  I tried to brush the hair out of my face with my clean left elbow, but failed.

  “Put it in the kitchen, why don’t you?” I suggested. “Himself’s inside. I’ll come as soon as I’ve got this lot sorted. Who—” I started to ask whom the letter was from, but tactfully altered this to “Who gave it to you?” Ronnie couldn’t read—though I saw no marks on the outside of the note, in any case.

  “A tinker on his way to Belem’s Creek handed it to me,” he said. “He didna say who gave it him—only that it was for the healer.”

  He frowned at the wadded paper, but I saw his eyes slide sideways toward my legs. In spite of the chill, I was barefoot and stripped to my chemise, no more than a smeared apron wrapped around my waist. Ronnie had been looking for a wife for some months, and in consequence had formed the unconscious habit of appraising the physical attributes of every woman he encountered, without regard to age or availability. He noticed my noticing, and hastily jerked his gaze away.

  “That was all?” I asked. “The healer? He didn’t give my name?”

  Sinclair rubbed a hand through thinning ginger hair, so two spikes stood up over his reddened ears, increasing his naturally sly, foxy look.

  “Didna have to, did he?” Without further attempts at conversation, he disappeared into the house, in search of food and Jamie. I blew upward, trying to get the stray hair out of my eyes, then gave up and returned to my sanguinary labors.

  The worst part was cleaning the blood; swishing an arm through the dark, reeking depths of the barrel to collect the threads of fibrin that formed as the blood began to clot. These clung to my arm and could then be pulled out and rinsed away—repeatedly. At that, it was slightly less nasty than the job of washing out the intestines to be used for the sausage casings; Brianna, Lizzie, and Marsali were doing that, down at the creek.

  I peered at the latest results; no fibers visible in the clear red liquid that dripped from my fingers. I dunked my arm again in the water cask that stood beside the blood barrel, balanced on boards laid across a pair of trestles under the big chestnut tree. Jamie, Roger, and Fergus had dragged the pig into the yard, clubbed it between the eyes with a maul, then swung it up into the branches, slit the throat, and let the blood drain into the barrel.

  Roger and Fergus had then taken the disemboweled carcass away to be scalded and the bristles scraped off; Jamie’s presence was required to deal with Colonel Richards, who had appeared suddenly, puffing and wheezing from the climb up to the ridge. Between the two, I thought Jamie would much have preferred to deal with the pig.

  I finished washing my hands and arms—wasted labor, but necessary to my peace of mind—and dried off with a linen towel. I shoveled double handsful into the barrel from the waiting bowls of barley, oatmeal, and boiled rice, smiling slightly at memory of the Colonel’s plum-red face, and Ronnie Sinclair’s complaints. Himself had picked his building site on the Ridge with a great deal of forethought—precisely because of the difficulties involved in reaching it.

  I pushed back my hair, then took a deep breath and plunged my clean arm back into the barrel. The blood was cooling rapidly. Doused by the cereal, the smell was less immediate now than the metallic reek of fresh, hot blood. The mixture was still warm to the touch, though, and the grains made graceful swirls of white and brown, pale whirlpools drawn into the blood as I stirred.

  Ronnie was right; it hadn’t been necessary to identify me further than “the healer.” There wasn’t another, closer than Cross Creek, unless one counted the shamans among the Indians—which most Europeans wouldn’t.

  I wondered who had sent the note, and whether the matter was urgent. Probably not—at least it was not likely to be a matter of imminent childbirth or serious accident. Word of such events was likely to arrive in person, carried urgently by a friend or relative. A written message entrusted to a tinker couldn’t be counted on to be delivered with any sort of promptitude; tinkers wandered or stayed, depending on what work they found.

  For that matter, tinkers and tramps seldom came so far as the Ridge, though we had seen three within the last month. I didn’t know whether that was the result of our growing population—Fraser’s Ridge boasted nearly forty families now, though the cabins were scattered over five miles of forested mountain slopes—or something more sinister.

  “It’s one of the signs, Sassenach,” Jamie had told me, frowning after the departing form of the last such temporary guest. “When there is war in the air, men take to the roads.”

  I thought he was right; I remembered wanderers on the Highland roads, carrying rumors of the Stuart Rising. It was as though the tremors of unrest jarred loose those who were not firmly attached to a place by love of land or family, and the swirling currents of dissension bore them onward, the first premonitory fragments of a slow-motion explosion that would shatter everything. I shivered, the light breeze touching cold through my shift.

  The mass of gruel had reached the necessary consistency, something like a very thick dark-red cream. I shook clumps of clotted grain from my fingers and reached with my clean left hand for the wooden bowl of minced and sautéed onions, standing ready. The strong smell of the onions overlaid the scent of butchery, pleasantly domestic.

  The salt was ground, so was the pepper. All I needed now… as if on cue, Roger appeared around the corner of the house, a large basin in his hands, filled with fine-chopped pork fat.

  “Just in time!” I said, and nodded toward the barrel. “No, don’t dump it in, it has to be measured—roughly.” I’d used ten double handsful of oatmeal, ten of rice, ten of barley. Half that, then—fifteen. I shook back the hair from my eyes again, and carefully scooped up a double handful of the basin’s content, dropping it into the barrel with a splat.

  “All right, are you?” I asked. I gestured toward a stool with my chin, beginning to work the fat into the mixture with my fingers. Roger was still a trifle pale and tight around the mouth, but he gave me a wry smile as he sat.

  “Fine.”

  “You didn’t have to do it, you know.”

  “Yes, I did.” The note of wryness in his voice deepened. “I only wish I’d done it better.”

  I shrugged, one-shouldered, and reached into the basin he held out for me. “It takes practice.”

  Roger had volunteered to kill the pig. Jamie had simply handed him the maul and stood back. I had seen Jamie kill pigs before; he said a brief prayer, blessed the pig, then crushed the skull with one tremendous blow. It had taken Roger five tries, and the memory of th
e squealing raised gooseflesh on my shoulders even now. Afterward, he had set down the maul, gone behind a tree, and been violently sick.

  I scooped another handful. The mix was thickening, developing a greasy feel.

  “He should have shown you how.”

  “I shouldn’t think there’s anything technically difficult about it,” Roger said dryly. “Straightforward enough, after all, to bash an animal on the head.”

  “Physically, perhaps,” I agreed. I scooped more fat, working with both hands now. “There’s a prayer for it, you know. For slaughtering an animal, I mean. Jamie should have told you.”

  He looked faintly startled.

  “No, I didn’t know.” He smiled, a little better now. “Last rites for the pig, aye?”

  “I don’t think it’s for the pig’s benefit,” I said tartly. We lapsed into silence for a few moments, as I creamed the rest of the fat into the grain mixture, pausing to flick away occasional bits of gristle. I could feel Roger’s eyes on the barrel, watching the curious alchemy of cookery, that process of making the transfer of life from one being to another palatable.

  “Highland drovers sometimes drain a cup or two of blood from one of their beasts, and mix it with oatmeal to eat on the road,” I said. “Nutritious, I suppose, but less tasty.”

  Roger nodded, abstracted. He had set down the nearly empty basin and was cleaning dried blood from under his nails with the point of his dirk.

  “Is it the same as the one for deer?” he asked. “The prayer. I’ve seen Jamie say that one, once, though I didn’t catch most of the words.”

  “The gralloch prayer? I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Roger worked industriously on a thumbnail, eyes fixed on his hand.

  “I wasn’t sure if he thought it right for me to know it. Me not being a Catholic, I mean.”

  Jamie had been rather taken aback by the discovery that his new son-in-law was a Presbyterian, but had seemed reassured when Roger made no demur over being married by a priest, or over Jemmy’s christening. He had quite given up watching Roger narrowly while saying grace at meals.