“After Lodge, then,” he said, grinning at her.
She took a deep breath and nodded.
“After Lodge,” she said, trying to sound as certain as he did.
I WAS THUMBING through my Merck, roaming from pleural disorders and the use of thoracentesis to a gripping account of inflammation of the rectal mucosa, but while my cerebellum could be coaxed into a momentary distraction, my brain stem, spinal cord, and sacral nerves were having none of it. If I’d had a tail, it would have been pressed tight between my legs, and small jolts of something between electricity and nausea spurted unexpectedly through my abdomen.
The girls knew that something was afoot. They’d been silent as mice at supper, gazing as though hypnotized at Jamie. I’d been likewise hypnotized, watching him dress afterward.
I’d stayed to help clear the table, put away the remnants and orts from the meal, and smoor the fire in the kitchen hearth, and when I came up to our bedroom, I found him facing away from me, on the far side of the room. He didn’t turn round; I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard me come in. His face was reflected in the window he stood in front of, but I could see that he wasn’t looking at his reflection.
He wasn’t looking anywhere. His eyes were fixed and full of darkness, and his fingers moved swiftly, twitching buttons free, unwinding his neckcloth, loosening his breeches—all as though he were somewhere else, completely unaware of what his hands were doing. He was preparing to fight.
His plaid lay on the bed, along with a clean shirt and his leather jerkin. He turned, presumably to fetch it, and saw me. He looked blank, and then the life flowed back into him.
“Ye look as though ye’ve seen a ghost, Sassenach,” he said, in a voice that was almost normal. “I ken I’ve aged a bit, but surely it’s none sae bad as all that?”
“You’d scare the Devil himself,” I said. I wasn’t joking, and he knew it.
“I know,” he said simply. “I was remembering how it was, just before the charge. At Drumossie. Folk were shouting and I could see the gunna mòr across the field, but it didna mean anything. I was shedding my clothes, because there was nothing left but draw my sword and run across the moor. I kent I’d never make it to the other side, and I didna care.”
I couldn’t speak. Neither did he, but went quietly about the business of washing, of putting on his clean sark and his belted plaid, and when he got to his feet, he smiled at me, though his eyes still held memories.
“Dinna fash, Sassenach. Cunningham wants to hand me over to Patrick Ferguson and take the credit. It’s his best chance to make his name among the Loyalist forces.”
I nodded obediently, knowing as well as he did that the motive for starting a fight often had nothing to do with how things turned out.
He started for the door, then stopped, waiting for me. I came slowly to him, touched him. He hadn’t put on his coat yet, and his arm was solid and warm through the cloth of his shirt.
“Will it be today?” I blurted. Twice before, he’d left me on the edge of a battlefield, telling me that while the day might come that he and I would part—it wouldn’t be today. And both times, he’d been right.
He cupped my cheek in one hand and looked at me for a long moment, and I knew he was fixing me in his memory, as I had just done to him.
“I dinna think so,” he said at last, soberly. His hand fell away, my cheek suddenly cool where he’d touched it. “But I willna lie to ye, Claire; I think it will be an evil night.”
LODGE NIGHT, BY custom, began roughly two hours after supper, to let everyone digest their food, finish their evening chores, and make their way from wherever they lived. Some homesteads were a good five or six miles from the Meeting House.
Jamie urgently wanted to arrive early, both to anticipate any ambush and to have a quiet keek around, in case Cunningham had thought to post men in the nearby woods. He didn’t, though. He stopped at the stable to check the welfare of his kine, then paused by the pigpen and counted the shadowy, stertorous forms clustered in the straw, noting that the straw had best be changed this week.
Then he walked slowly up the hill toward the Meeting House. The weather had warmed abruptly and bats were flickering through the air between the trees, snatching insects too fast to see. Brianna had told him how they did it, and if he listened close, he thought he could sometimes catch their high-pitched cries, thin and sharp as broken glass.
Tom MacLeod stepped out of the trees and fell into step beside him with a quiet “Mac Dubh.” It gave him an odd feeling, sometimes, when one of his Ardsmuir men called him that. Memories of prison, the hard things—and they were hard—but also the fleeting, regular pulse of the kinship that had kept them alive and would bind them for life. And at the bottom of his heart, always, a faint sense of his father, the Black One whose son he was.