The soft brown eyes filled with alarm. "Ye'll no be going at once, surely?"
I shook my head. "No, not at once. But we'll need to leave well before the snow comes." Jamie had decided that our best course was to go to Beauly, seat of clan Fraser. Perhaps his grandfather, Lord Lovat, could be of help; if not, he might at least arrange us passage to France.
Ian nodded, reassured. "Oh, aye. But you've a few weeks yet."
It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it. We walked slowly so that I could keep an eye out for late-blooming eglantine and teasel heads, chatting casually.
"It's Quarter Day next week," Jamie remarked. "Will your new gown be ready then?"
"I expect so. Why, is it an occasion?"
He smiled down at me, taking the basket while I stooped to pull up a stalk of tansy.
"Oh, in a way. Nothing like Colum's great affairs, to be sure, but all the Lallybroch tenants will come to pay their rents—and their respects to the new Lady Lallybroch."
"I expect they'll be surprised you've married an Englishwoman."
"I reckon there are a few fathers might be disappointed at that; I'd courted a lass or two hereabouts before I got arrested and taken to Fort William."
"Sorry you didn't wed a local girl?" I asked coquettishly.
"If ye think I'm going to say 'yes,' and you standin' there holding a pruning knife," he remarked, "you've less opinion of my good sense than I thought."
I dropped the pruning knife, which I'd taken to dig with, stretched my arms out, and stood waiting. When he released me at last, I stooped to pick up the knife again, saying teasingly, "I always wondered how it was you stayed a virgin so long. Are the girls in Lallybroch all plain, then?"
"No," he said, squinting up into the morning sun. "It was mostly my father was responsible for that. We'd stroll over the fields in the evenings, sometimes, he and I, and talk about things. And once I got old enough for such a thing to be a possibility, he told me that a man must be responsible for any seed he sows, for it's his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I'd no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions."
He glanced behind us, toward the house. And toward the small family graveyard, near the foot of the broch, where his parents were buried.
"He said the greatest thing in a man's life is to lie wi' a woman he loves," he said softly. He smiled at me, eyes blue as the sky overhead. "He was right."
I touched his face lightly, tracing the broad sweep downward from cheek to jaw.
"Rather hard on you, though, if he expected you to wait so long to marry," I said.
Jamie grinned, kilt flapping round his knees in the brisk autumn breeze.
"Well, the Church does teach that self-abuse is a sin, but my father said he thought that if it came to a choice between abusin' yourself or some poor woman, a decent man might choose to make the sacrifice."
When I stopped laughing, I shook my head and said, "No. No, I won't ask. You did stay a virgin, though."
"Strictly by the grace of God and my father, Sassenach. I dinna think I thought much about anything but the lasses, once I turned fourteen or so. But that was when I was sent to foster wi' Dougal at Beannachd."
"No girls there?" I asked. "I thought Dougal had daughters."
"Aye, he has. Four. The two younger are no much to look at, but the eldest was a verra handsome lassie. A year or two older than me, Molly was. And not much flattered by my attention, I dinna think. I used to stare at her across the supper table, and she'd look down her nose at me and ask did I have the catarrh? Because if so, I should go to bed, and if not, she would be much obliged if I'd close my mouth, as she didna care to look at my tonsils while she was earing."
"I begin to see how you stayed a virgin," I said, hiking my skirts to climb a stile. "But they can't all have been like that."
"No," he said reflectively, giving me a hand over the stile. "No, they weren't. Molly's younger sister, Tabitha, was a bit friendlier." He smiled reminiscently.
"Tibby was the first girl I kissed. Or perhaps I should say the first girl who kissed me. I was carrying two pails of milk for her, from the barn to the dairy, plotting all the way how I'd get her behind the door, where there wasna room to get away, and kiss her there. But my hands were full, and she had to open the door for me to go through. So it was me ended up behind the door, and Tib who walked up to me, took me by both ears and kissed me. Spilled the milk, too," he added.