"I think this one belongs to the local squire's son," he said, flipping the lacy jabot. "Bit of a dandy, it looks like."
We dismounted and left the horses at the foot of a small hill. A footpath led upward through the heather.
"Ye've made the arrangements?" I heard Dougal say in an undertone to Rupert, as they tethered the beasts.
"Och, aye." There was a flash of teeth in the black beard. "Was a bit o' trouble to persuade the padre, but we showed him the special license." He patted his sporran, which clinked musically, giving me some idea of the nature of the special license.
Through the drizzle and mist, I saw the chapel jutting out of the heather. With a sense of complete disbelief, I saw the round-shouldered roof and the odd little many-paned windows, which I had last seen on the bright sunny morning of my marriage to Frank Randall.
"No!" I exclaimed. "Not here! I can't!"
"Hst, now, hst. Dinna worry, lass, dinna worry. It will be all right." Dougal put a large paw on my shoulder, making soothing Scottish noises, as if I were a skittish horse. " 'Tis natural to be a bit nervous," he said, to all of us. A firm hand in the small of my back urged me on up the path. My shoes sank moistly in the damp layer of fallen leaves.
Jamie and Dougal walked close on either side of me, preventing escape. Their looming plaid presences were unnerving, and I felt a mounting sense of hysteria. Two hundred years ahead, more or less, I had been married in this chapel, charmed then by its ancient picturesqueness. The chapel now was creaking with newness, its boards not yet settled into charm, and I was about to marry a twenty-three-year-old Scottish Catholic virgin with a price on his head, whose—
I turned to Jamie in sudden panic. "I can't marry you! I don't even know your last name!"
He looked down at me and cocked a ruddy eyebrow. "Oh. It's Fraser. James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser." He pronounced it formally, each name slow and distinct.
Completely flustered, I said "Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp," and stuck out my hand idiotically. Apparently taking this as a plea for support, he took the hand and tucked it firmly into the crook of his elbow. Thus inescapably pinioned, I squelched up the path to my wedding.
Rupert and Murtagh were waiting for us in the chapel, keeping guard over a captive cleric, a spindly young priest with a red nose and a justifiably terrified expression. Rupert was idly slicing a willow twig with a large knife, and while he had laid aside his horn-handled pistols on entering the church, they remained in easy reach on the rim of the baptismal font.
The other men also disarmed, as was suitable in the house of God, leaving an impressively bristling pile of lethality in the back pew. Only Jamie kept his dagger and sword, presumably as a ceremonial part of his dress.
We knelt before the wooden altar, Murtagh and Dougal took their places as witnesses, and the ceremony began.
The form of the Catholic marriage service has not changed appreciably in several hundred years, and the words linking me with the redheaded young stranger at my side were much the same as those that had consecrated my wedding to Frank. I felt like a cold, hollow shell. The young priest's stammering words echoed somewhere in the empty pit of my stomach.
I stood automatically when it came time for the vows, watching in a sort of numbed fascination as my chilly fingers disappeared into my bridegroom's substantial grasp. His fingers were as cold as my own, and it occurred to me for the first time that despite his outwardly cool demeanor, he might be as nervous as I was.
I had so far avoided looking at him, but now glanced up to find him staring down at me. His face was white and carefully expressionless; he looked as he had when I dressed the wound in his shoulder. I tried to smile at him, but the corners of my mouth wobbled precariously. The pressure of his fingers on mine increased. I had the impression that we were holding each other up; if either of us let go or looked away, we would both fall down. Oddly, the feeling was mildly reassuring. Whatever we were in for, at least there were two of us.
"I take thee, Claire, to be my wife…" His voice didn't shake, but his hand did. I tightened my grip. Our stiff fingers clenched together like boards in a vise. "… to love, honor and protect… for better and for worse…" The words came from far away. The blood was draining from my head. The boned bodice was infernally tight, and though I felt cold, sweat ran down my sides beneath the satin. I hoped I wouldn't faint.
There was a small stained-glass window set high in the wall at the side of the sanctuary, a crude rendering of John the Baptist in his bearskin. Green and blue shadows flowed over my sleeve, reminding me of the tavern's public room, and I wished fervently for a drink.