“I ken that,” Jamie said in a voice dry as sand. “Few men ken it better.”
A hot flush of embarrassment burned its way up Roger’s chest and into his neck. He could feel it take him by the throat, and couldn’t speak at all for a moment.
“Aye,” Jamie said, after a moment. “Aye, it’s a point. But I think it’s maybe easier to forgive a dead man than one who’s walkin’ about under your nose. And come to that, I thought she’d have an easier time forgiving me than him.” He lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “And … whether she could bear the thought of the man living near us or not—I couldn’t.”
Roger made a small sound of acknowledgment; there seemed nothing else useful to say.
Jamie didn’t move or speak. He sat with his head slightly turned away, looking out over the water, where a fugitive light glimmered over the breeze-touched surface.
“It was maybe the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he said at last, very quietly.
“Morally, do you mean?” Roger asked, his own voice carefully neutral. Jamie’s head turned toward him, and Roger caught a blue flash of surprise as the last of the sun touched the side of his face.
“Och, no,” his father-in-law said at once. “Only hard to do.”
“Aye.” Roger let the silence settle again, waiting. He could feel Jamie thinking, though the man didn’t move. Did he need to tell it to someone, relive it and thus ease his soul by full confession? He felt in himself a terrible curiosity, and at the same time a desperate wish not to hear. He drew breath and spoke abruptly.
“I told Brianna. That I’d killed Boble, and—and how. Maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Jamie’s face was completely in shadow, but Roger could feel those blue eyes on his own face, fully lit by the setting sun. With an effort, he didn’t look down.
“Aye?” Jamie said, his voice calm, but definitely curious. “What did she say to ye? If ye dinna mind telling me, I mean.”
“I—well. To tell the truth, the only thing I remember for sure is that she said, ‘I love you.’” That was the only thing he’d heard, through the echo of drums and the drumming of his own pulse in his ears. He’d told her kneeling, his head in her lap. She’d kept on saying it then: “I love you,” her arms wrapping his shoulders, sheltering him with the fall of her hair, absolving him with her tears.
For a moment, he was back inside that memory, and he came to himself with a start, realizing that Jamie had said something.
“What did you say?”
“I said—and how is it Presbyterians dinna think marriage is a sacrament?”
Jamie moved on his rock, facing Roger directly. The sun was all but down, no more than a nimbus of bronze in his hair; his features were dark.
“You’re a priest, Roger Mac,” he said, in the same tone he might have used to describe any natural phenomenon, such as a piebald horse or a flight of mallard ducks. “It’s plain to me—and to you, I reckon—that God’s called ye so, and He’s brought ye to this place and this time to do it.”
“Well, the being a minister part is clear,” Roger said dryly. “As for the rest … your guess is possibly no better than mine. And a guess is the best I’ve got.”
“That would put ye well ahead of the rest of us, man,” Jamie said, the smile evident in his voice. He rose to his feet, a black shadow with rod in hand, stooping for the rush-woven creel. “We’d best start back, aye?”
There was no real passage between the shore of the trout pond and the deer trail that led along the lower slopes of the Ridge, and the effort of scrambling up through boulders and heavy brush in the fading light kept them from speaking much.
“How old were you, the first time you saw a man killed?” Roger said abruptly to Jamie’s back.
“Eight,” Jamie replied without hesitation. “In a fight during my first cattle raid. I wasna much troubled about it.”
A stone rolled under his foot and he slid, snatching at a fir branch in time to save himself. Getting his feet back under him, he crossed himself and muttered something under his breath.
The smell of bruised fir needles was strong in the air as they moved more slowly, watching the ground. Roger wondered whether things really did smell stronger at dusk, or whether it was that with your sight fading, you just paid more attention to your other senses.
“In Scotland,” Jamie said, quite abruptly, “in the Rising, I watched my uncle Dougal kill one of his own men. That was a terrible thing, though it was done for mercy.”