“That was when he became … a bit more than a friend,” Roger said. He looked down and cleared his throat. “He came with me to search for Jem. Jem wasn’t there, of course, but we did find another Jeremiah. My father,” he said abruptly, his voice cracking on the word. I reached by reflex for his hand, but he waved me off, clearing his throat again.
“It’s okay. I’ll—I’ll tell you about that … later.” He swallowed and straightened a little, meeting my eyes again. “But Buck—that’s what we called him, Buck—when we came through the stones in search of Jem, we were both … damaged by the passage. You said, I think, that it got worse, if you did it more than once?”
“I wouldn’t say once isn’t damaging,” I said, with a small internal shudder at the memory of that void, a chaos where nothing seems to exist but noise. That, and the faint flicker of thought, all that holds you together between one breath and the next. “But yes, it does get worse. What happened to you?”
“To me, not that much. Unconscious for a bit, woke up strangling, fighting for air. Muck sweat, disorientation; couldn’t keep my balance for a bit, staggered all over. But Buck—” He frowned, and I saw his eyes change as he looked inward again, seeing the green hilltop of Craigh na Dun as he woke with the rain on his face. As I had waked three times. The hair on my neck rose slowly.
“It seemed to be his heart. He had a pain in his chest, his left arm, and he couldn’t breathe well, said it was like a weight on his chest, and he couldn’t get up. I got him water, though, and after a bit he seemed okay. At least he could walk, and he brushed off any suggestion that we stop and rest.”
They had separated then, Buck to search the road toward Inverness, Roger to go to Lallybroch, and—
“Lallybroch!” This time I did grab him by the arm. “You went there?”
“I did,” he said, and smiled. He clasped my hand, where it lay on his arm. “I met Brian Fraser.”
“You—but—Brian?” I shook my head in order to clear it. That made no sense.
“No, it didn’t make sense,” he said, plainly reading my thoughts from my face and smiling at the results. “We … didn’t go where—I mean when—we thought we were going. We ended in 1739.”
I stared at him for a moment, and he shrugged helplessly.
“Later,” I said firmly, and reached for his throat again, thinking, “In medias res.” What the devil did McEwan mean by that?
I could hear distant childish shouts from the direction of the creek, and the high, cracked screech of a hawk in the tall snag at the far side of our clearing; I could just see him—or her—from the corner of my eye: a large dark shape like a torpedo on a dead branch. And I was beginning to hear—or to think I heard—the thrum of blood in Roger’s neck, a faint sound, separate from the thump of his pulse. And the fact that I was evidently hearing it through my fingertips seemed shockingly ordinary.
“Talk to me a bit more,” I suggested, as much to avoid hearing what I thought I heard as in order to loosen up his larynx. “About anything.”
He hummed for a moment, but that made him cough, and I dropped my hand so he could turn his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “Bobby Higgins was just telling me the Ridge is growing—a lot of new families, I hear?”
“Like weeds,” I said, replacing my hand. “We came back to find that at least twenty new families had settled down, and there’ve been three more just since we came back from Savannah, where the winds of war had briefly blown us.”
He nodded, a slight frown on his face, and gave me a sidelong green glance. “I don’t suppose any of the new settlers is a minister?”
“No,” I said promptly. “Is that what you—I mean, you still think you—”
“I do.” He looked up at me, a little shyly. “I’m not fully ordained yet; I’ll need to take care of that, somehow. But when we decided to come back, we talked—Bree and I. About what we might do. Here. And …” He lifted both shoulders, palms on his knees. “That’s what I might do.”
“You were a minister here before,” I said, watching his face. “Do you really have to be formally ordained to do it again?”
He didn’t have to think; he’d done his thinking long since.
“I do,” he said. “I don’t feel … wrong … about having buried or married folk before, or christened them. Someone had to do it, and I was all there was. But I want it to be right.” He smiled a little. “It’s maybe like the difference between being handfast and being properly married. Between a promise and a vow. Even if ye ken ye’d never break the promise, ye want—” He struggled for the words. “Ye want the weight of the vow. Something to stand at your back.”