“You shouldn’t worry,” he assured me. “He is a man who loved you; he means you no harm.”
“Oh. Good.” I’d broken out in a cold sweat and groped for a handkerchief. I was wiping my face and neck with it when the Sachem got to his feet and offered me a hand.
“What is strange,” he said as I rose, “is that this man often follows your husband, too.”
WHEN I GOT back to the house, I went straight to Jamie’s study. Jamie wasn’t in it; he’d gone to check operations at the still, as he did twice weekly. I didn’t hear anyone in the house, but found myself walking as softly as a cat burglar, and wondered exactly whom I was sneaking up on. The answer to that was obvious, and I resumed my normal firm step, letting the echoes fall where they might.
The book was still behind the ledgers. I turned it over with the distinct feeling that it might explode, or the photograph leap from the cover and accost me. Nothing happened, though, and the photograph remained … just a photograph. It was certainly an image of Frank, much as I remembered him, but I didn’t feel Frank’s presence. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I glanced over my shoulder. Nothing there.
Would you know, if there was? That thought raised goose bumps on my forearms, but I shook it off.
“I would,” I said firmly, aloud, and took the book to the window, so the sun shone on it. Frank was wearing his normal black-rimmed glasses in the photo—but he wasn’t wearing a hat.
“Well, assuming he’s right,” I said accusingly to the photo, “what the hell are you doing, following either me or Jamie around?”
Getting no answer to this, I sat down in Jamie’s chair.
The Sachem had said Frank—always assuming it was Frank he saw, though I was becoming sure of this—was “a man who loved you.” Loved, past tense. That gave me a small double pang: one of loss, the other of reassurance. Presumably there was no question of postmortem jealousy, then? But if not …
But you don’t even know that Jamie’s right about this damned book!
I opened the book, read a page without taking in a word of its meaning, and closed it again. It didn’t bloody matter. Whether by Frank’s intent—malign or not—or only a figment of Jamie’s imagination, stimulated by the pressure of current events or the stirrings of a mistaken sense of guilt … Jamie thought what he thought, and nothing short of Divine Revelation was likely to change that.
I closed my eyes and sat still. We didn’t yet own a clock, and yet I could hear the seconds tick past. My body kept its own time, between my heartbeat and the pulsing of my blood, the ebb and flow of sleep and wakefulness. If time was eternal, why wasn’t I? Or perhaps we only become eternal when we stop keeping time.
I’d nearly died three times: when I lost Faith, when I caught a great fever, and—only a year ago!—when I was shot at Monmouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember, but I remembered only small, vivid flashes of each experience. I felt very calm, thinking of death. It wasn’t something I was afraid of; I just didn’t want to go while there were people who needed me.
Jamie had come to the verge of death more frequently—and a lot more violently—than I had, and I didn’t think he was afraid of it, either.
But you still have people who need you, dammit!
The thought made me angry—at both Frank and Jamie—and I got up and shoved the book back behind the ledgers. Even without a clock, I knew it was nearly suppertime. I had a sort of chowder going, made with potatoes and onions and a little dried corn, but it wasn’t very good … Bacon! Yes, definitely bacon.
I was coming out of the smoke shed with several rashers on a plate when a bit more of what I was determinedly not thinking about bubbled up. Bree had told me—and Jamie—about the letter Frank had left for her. An extremely disturbing letter, on multiple levels. But what was echoing in the back of my mind just now was the last paragraph of that letter:
And … there’s him. Your mother said that Fraser sent her back to me, knowing that I would protect her—and you. She thought that he died immediately afterward. He did not. I looked for him, and I found him. And, like him, perhaps I send you back, knowing—as he knew of me—that he will protect you with his life.
For the first time, it occurred to me that even if Jamie was right, and Frank was making an attempt to tell him something—it might be a warning, rather than a threat.
118
The Viscountess
Savannah
WILLIAM DIDN’T GO DIRECTLY to Lord John’s house when he arrived in Savannah. Instead, he stopped at a barber on Bay Street and had a much-needed shave and his hair trimmed and properly bound. That was as much as he could do for the moment, bar digging a halfway-clean shirt out of his saddlebag and changing into it in the shop. Face raw and stinging with razor burn and bay rum, and deeply aware of his own residual stink beneath it, he left his horse at the livery, walked to Oglethorpe Street, and after a moment’s thought circled his father’s house and walked into the cookhouse out back.