"My father was a Fraser, of course; a younger half-brother to the present Master of Lovat. My mother was a MacKenzie, though. Ye'll know that Dougal and Colum are my uncles?" I nodded. The resemblance was clear enough, despite the difference in coloring. The broad cheekbones and long, straight, knife-edged nose were plainly a MacKenzie inheritance.
"Aye, well, my mother was their sister, and there were two more sisters, besides. My auntie Janet is dead, like my mother, but my auntie Jocasta married a cousin of Rupert's, and lives up near the edge of Loch Eilean. Auntie Janet had six children, four boys and two girls, Auntie Jocasta has three, all girls, Dougal's got the four girls, Colum has little Hamish only, and my parents had me and my sister, who's named for my Auntie Janet, but we called her Jenny always."
"Rupert's a MacKenzie, too?" I asked, already struggling to keep everyone straight.
"Aye. He's—" Jamie paused a moment considering, "he's Dougal, Colum, and Jocasta's first cousin, which makes him my second cousin. Rupert's father and my grandfather Jacob were brothers, along with—"
"Wait a minute. Don't let's go back any farther than we have to, or I shall be getting hopelessly muddled. We haven't even got to the Frasers yet, and I've already lost track of your cousins."
He rubbed his chin, calculating. "Hmm. Well, on the Fraser side it's a bit more complicated, because my grandfather Simon married three times, so my father had two sets of half-brothers and half-sisters. Let's leave it for now that I've six Fraser uncles and three aunts still living, and we'll leave out all the cousins from that lot."
"Yes, let's." I leaned forward and poured another glass of wine for each of us.
The clan territories of MacKenzie and Fraser, it turned out, adjoined each other for some distance along their inner borders, running side by side from the seacoast past the lower end of Loch Ness. This shared border, as borders tend to be, was an unmapped and most uncertain line, shifting to and fro in accordance with time, custom and alliance. Along this border, at the southern end of the Fraser clan lands, lay the small estate of Broch Tuarach, the property of Brian Fraser, Jamie's father.
"It's a fairly rich bit of ground, and there's decent fishing and a good patch of forest for hunting. It maybe supports sixty crofts, and the small village—Broch Mordha, it's called. Then there's the manor house, of course—that's modern," he said, with some pride, "and the old broch that we use now for the beasts and the grain.
"Dougal and Colum were not at all pleased to have their sister marrying a Fraser, and they insisted that she not be a tenant on Fraser land, but live on a freehold. So, Lallybroch—that's what the folk that live there call it—was deeded to my father, but there was a clause in the deed stating that the land was to pass to my mother, Ellen's, issue only. If she died without children, the land would go back to Lord Lovat after my father's death, whether Father had children by another wife or no. But he didn't remarry, and I am my mother's son. So Lallybroch's mine, for what that's worth."
"I thought you were telling me yesterday that you didn't have any property." I sipped the wine, finding it rather good; it seemed to be getting better, the more I drank of it. I thought perhaps I had better stop soon.
Jamie wagged his head from side to side. "Well, it belongs to me, right enough. The thing is, though, it doesna do me much good at present, as I can't go there." He looked apologetic. "There's the minor matter of the price on my head, ye see."
After his escape from Fort William, he had been taken to Dougal's house, Beannachd （means "Blessed," he explained）， to recover from his wounds and the consequent fever. From there, he had gone to France, where he had spent two years fighting with the French army, around the Spanish border.
"You spent two years in the French army and stayed a virgin?" I blurted out incredulously. I had had a number of Frenchmen in my care, and I doubted very much that the Gallic attitude toward women had changed appreciably in two hundred years.
One corner of Jamie's mouth twitched, and he looked down at me sideways.
"If ye had seen the harlots that service the French army, Sassenach, ye'd wonder I've the nerve even to touch a woman, let alone bed one."
I choked, spluttering wine and coughing until he was obliged to pound me on the back. I subsided, breathless and red-faced, and urged him to go on with his story.
He had returned to Scotland a year or so ago, and spent six months alone or with a gang of "broken men"—men without clans—living hand to mouth in the forest, or raiding cattle from the borderlands.