“He’s—it’s—” He shook his head, looking for words. “He’s talking to me,” he repeated doggedly. “He kens who I am—who I am,” he said with emphasis and looked at me, his eyes dark blue. “He kens it’s the Scotsman that took his wife from him and he’s talkin’ directly to me. I can feel him, as if he stood behind me, whispering in my ear.” I flinched, violently, and he blinked, startled.
“That sounds … unpleasant,” I said. The tiny hairs prickled along my jaw.
The corner of his mouth turned up. He stopped what he was doing and took my hand, and I felt better.
“Well, it’s a mite unsettling, Sassenach. I dinna mind it, exactly—I mean, surely to God he has the right to say things to me if he likes. It’s only … why?”
“Well …” I said slowly. “Maybe … perhaps … for us?” I nodded toward the distant creek, where Jem and Germain and Mandy and Fanny were evidently catching leeches, with a good deal of shrieking. My lips felt dry, and I licked them briefly.
“I mean—we think, don’t we, that he found out? About you not dying, I mean. And maybe that he knew or guessed that Bree would come back looking for you. Maybe he … found me, too. In history, I mean.” Speaking the words made me feel quite hollow. The thought of Frank discovering something—God knew what—about me in the maelstrom of scattered documents. And making up his mind—while I was still right there with him, dammit!—not to tell me—and to find out more.
“He hasn’t—mentioned me, has he? In the book?” I forced the words out, just above the sound of the wind. A cold drop struck my cheek, and four large dark spots appeared instantly on my apron.
“No,” Jamie said, and rose to his feet, reaching down a hand to me. “Come inside, a nighean, it’s starting to rain.”
We barely made it into the house with the basin, the bowl, and our peanut crop—followed in short order by Germain, Jemmy, Fanny, Mandy, Aidan McCallum, and Aodh MacLennan, splattered with rain and with arms full of wet vegetables from the garden.
What with one thing and another—grinding the peanuts, putting the risen bread to bake, washing dirt from the young turnips, saving the greens in a bowl of cold water to keep them from wilting, handing fresh small knobby carrots out to the children, who ate them like candy, then slicing the fresh bread and assembling sandwiches, while roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes and making a warm bacon dressing for the cooked greens—there was no further conversation between me and Jamie about Frank’s book. And if anyone stood behind me, he was considerate enough to give me elbow room.
IT WENT ON raining through supper, and after ascertaining that the McCallums and the MacLennans wouldn’t be worrying where their boys were, Jamie brought down the mattresses and all of the children bedded down together in a damp, warm heap before the hearth.
Jamie had made a fire in our bedroom, and the scent of dried fir kindling and hickory wood overlaid the lingering turpentine scent of the fresh timbers. He was lying on the bed, clad in his nightshirt and smelling pleasantly of warm animals, cold hay, and peanut butter, and thumbing idly through my Merck Manual, which I’d left on the bedside table.
“Trying the Sortes Virgilianae, are you?” I asked, sitting down beside him and shaking my hair loose from its knot. “Most people use the Bible for that, but I suppose Merck might do just as well.”
“Hadna thought of that,” he said, smiling, and closing the book, handed it to me. “Why not? You choose, then.”
“All right.” I weighed the book in my hands for a moment, enjoying the tidy heft of it and the feel of the pebbled cover under my fingertips. I closed my eyes, opened the book at random, and ran my finger down the page. “What have we got?”
Jamie took his spectacles off and leaned over my arm, peering at the spot I’d marked.
“The symptomology of this condition is both varied and obscure, requiring extensive observation and repeated testing before a diagnosis can be made,” he read. He glanced up at me. “Aye, well, that’s about the size of it, no?”
“Yes,” I said, and closed the book, feeling obscurely comforted. Jamie gave a mild snort, but took the book from me and put it back on the table.
“Ye can take the extensive observations as given,” he said dryly. “Repeated testing, though …” His expression changed, turning inward. “Aye, maybe. Just maybe. I’ll need to think on that.”