“I dinna ken, that’s the trouble. It might be me, and it bloody well might not be, too. He mentions my name fourteen times, but never makin’ enough of it to be able to tell whether it’s me or someone else. He never comes right out and says, ‘Jamie Fraser of Fraser’s Ridge,’ or ‘Broch Tuarach,’ or anything o’ that sort.”
“Why are ye worried, then, Uncle?”
“Because he says there’s going to be a battle nearby us—at a place called Kings Mountain. And Jamie Fraser’s killed in it. Will be, I mean. A Jamie Fraser.” Saying it aloud actually steadied him a little. It seemed ridiculous.
Ian wasn’t taking it that way, though. He gripped Jamie’s arm, close in the darkness.
“Ye think it’s you he means?”
“Well, that’s the devil of it, Ian. I canna say, at all. See—” His lips were dry, and he licked them briefly. “The man kent about me, and he had nay reason to love me. We—Claire and Bree and I—think Frank Randall knew that the lass would come back, to find her mother and me. And if he looked, in—in history—he’d maybe find us.”
Ian clicked his tongue in consternation—in just the way his father had, and Jamie smiled involuntarily.
“And if he did …”
“No man is objective about Claire,” Jamie said. “I mean—they’re just not.”
Ian made a wee fizzing noise of assent.
“Which isna to say everyone loves her …”
“A lot of us do, Uncle,” his nephew assured him. “But aye, I ken what ye mean.”
“Aye. Well, what I mean is—and I ken this sounds as though I’ve lost my senses and maybe I have—but … I’ve read his book, and by God, I think the man is talkin’ to me.”
Ian was silent for quite a while. The dim shape of a nightjar rose from the ground near their feet and shot off into the dark with a high, clear zeeek!
“And if he is talkin’ to you?” Ian said at last.
That scared him.
“If he is—and if the Jamie Fraser who dies at Kings Mountain is me … I just … I …” He couldn’t ask it. And for God’s sake, he was not afraid of dying, not so many times as he’d looked Death in the face. It was only—
Ian’s hand slid into his and clasped it firmly.
“I’ll be there with ye, Uncle. When does it happen? The battle, I mean.”
Relief coursed through him, and the breath he took went down to his feet.
“In about a year. October next, it will be. Or … so he says.”
“That’ll be plenty time enough for me to do whatever needs to be done in the North,” Ian said, then squeezed his hand and let it go. “Dinna fash.”
Jamie nodded, his heart full. In the morning he would bid them all farewell, but he would take his leave of Ian òg now.
“Turn about, Ian,” he said quietly, and Ian did, looking out at the house across the street, dark save for the glow of a smoored hearth, visible at the edge of the shutters. He put a hand on Ian’s shoulder, and spoke for him the blessing for a warrior going out.
63
The Third Floor
Fraser’s Ridge
IT WAS A BIG house. Roger and Bree were gone, and now Jamie had left to see Ian and Rachel and Jenny safely on their road. The house seemed even bigger now, with only two people and a dog in it.
Fanny, deprived of companionship, clung to me like a small cocklebur, her footsteps echoing behind me—and the tic-tic-tic of Bluebell’s behind hers—as I went to and fro from surgery to kitchen to parlor and back to surgery, the three of us always conscious of the vacant bedrooms overhead and the distant, shadowy, empty third floor high above, its walls a ghostly forest of studs, its glassless windows still covered by laths to keep out rain and snow until the vanished master should return to finish the jobs he’d left undone.
I’d invited her to share my bedroom, and we’d hauled in the truckle bed from the children’s room. It was a comfort to hear each other’s breathing in the night, something warm and quick, almost drowning out the slow, chilled breathing of the house around us—almost imperceptible, but definitely there. Especially at dusk, when the shadows began to rise up the walls like a silent tide, spilling darkness into the room.
Now and then I’d wake at dawn to find Fanny in my bed, curled against me for warmth and sound asleep, Bluey lying in a nest of quilts at our feet. The dog would look up when I woke, gently thwapping her feathery tail against the bedding, but she wouldn’t move until Fanny did.