Now, in equally quick succession, all these possibilities had been jerked away, and I faced an unknown future once more.
Oddly enough, I was not so much distressed by this as excited by it. I had been settled for twenty years, rooted as a barnacle by my attachments to Brianna, to Frank, to my patients. Now fate—and my own actions—had ripped me loose from all those things, and I felt as though I were tumbling free in the surf, at the mercy of forces a great deal stronger than myself.
My breath had misted the glass. I traced a small heart in the cloudiness, as I had used to do for Brianna on cold mornings. Then, I would put her initials inside the heart—B.E.R., for Brianna Ellen Randall. Would she still call herself Randall? I wondered, or Fraser, now? I hesitated, then drew two letters inside the outline of the heart—a “J” and a “C.”
I was still standing before the window when the door opened and Jamie came in.
“Are ye awake still?” he asked, rather unnecessarily.
“The rain kept me from sleeping.” I went and embraced him, glad of his warm solidness to dispel the cold gloom of the night.
He hugged me, resting his cheek against my hair. He smelt faintly of seasickness, much more strongly of candlewax and ink.
“Have you been writing?” I asked.
He looked down at me in astonishment. “I have, but how did ye know that?”
“You smell of ink.”
He smiled slightly, stepping back and running his hand through his hair. “You’ve a nose as keen as a truffle pig’s, Sassenach.”
“Why, thank you, what a graceful compliment,” I said. “What were you writing?”
The smile disappeared from his face, leaving him looking strained and tired.
“A letter to Jenny,” he said. He went to the table, where he shed his coat and began to unfasten his stock and jabot. “I didna want to write her until we’d seen Jared, and I could tell her what plans we had, and what the prospects were for bringing Ian home safe.” He grimaced, and pulled the shirt over his head. “God knows what she’ll do when she gets it—and thank God, I’ll be at sea when she does,” he added wryly, emerging from the folds of linen.
It couldn’t have been an easy piece of composition, but I thought he seemed easier for the writing of it. He sat down to take off his shoes and stockings, and I came behind him to undo the clubbed queue of his hair.
“I’m glad the writing’s over, at least,” he said, echoing my thought. “I’d been dreading telling her, more than anything else.”
“You told her the truth?”
He shrugged. “I always have.”
Except about me. I didn’t voice the thought, though, but began to rub his shoulders, kneading the knotted muscles.
“What did Jared do with Mr. Willoughby?” I asked, massage bringing the Chinese to mind. He had accompanied us on the Channel crossing, sticking to Jamie like a small blue-silk shadow. Jared, used to seeing everything on the docks, had taken Mr. Willoughby in stride, bowing gravely to him and addressing him with a few words of Mandarin, but his housekeeper had viewed this unusual guest with considerably more suspicion.
“I believe he’s gone to sleep in the stable.” Jamie yawned, and stretched himself luxuriously. “Mathilde said she wasna accustomed to have heathens in the house and didna mean to start now. She was sprinkling the kitchen wi’ holy water after he ate supper there.” Glancing up, he caught sight of the heart I had traced on the windowpane, black against the misted glass, and smiled.
“What’s that?”
“Just silliness,” I said.
He reached up and took my right hand, the ball of his thumb caressing the small scar at the base of my own thumb, the letter “J” he had made with the point of his knife, just before I left him, before Culloden.
“I didna ask,” he said, “whether ye wished to come with me. I could leave ye here; Jared would have ye stay wi’ him and welcome, here or in Paris. Or ye could go back to Lallybroch, if ye wished.”
“No, you didn’t ask,” I said. “Because you knew bloody well what the answer would be.”
We looked at each other and smiled. The lines of heartsickness and weariness had lifted from his face. The candlelight glowed softly on the burnished crown of his head as he bent and gently kissed the palm of my hand.
The wind still whistled in the chimney, and the rain ran down the glass like tears outside, but it no longer mattered. Now I could sleep.
* * *
The sky had cleared by morning. A brisk, cold breeze rattled the windowpanes of Jared’s study, but couldn’t penetrate to the cozy room inside. The house at Le Havre was much smaller than his lavish Paris residence, but still boasted three stories of solid, half-timbered comfort.
I pushed my feet farther toward the crackling fire, and dipped my quill into the inkwell. I was making up a list of all the things I thought might be needed in the medical way for a two-month voyage. Distilled alcohol was both the most important and the easiest to obtain; Jared had promised to get me a cask in Paris.
“We’d best label it something else, though,” he’d told me. “Or the sailors will have drunk it before you’ve left port.”
Purified lard, I wrote slowly, St.-John’s-wort; garlic, ten pounds; yarrow. I wrote borage, then shook my head and crossed it out, replacing it with the older name by which it was more likely known now, bugloss.
It was slow work. At one time, I had known the medicinal uses of all the common herbs, and not a few uncommon ones. I had had to; they were all that was available.
At that, many of them were surprisingly effective. Despite the skepticism—and outspoken horror—of my supervisors and colleagues at the hospital in Boston, I had used them occasionally on my modern patients to good effect. （“Did you see what Dr. Randall did?” a shocked intern’s cry echoed in memory, making me smile as I wrote. “She fed the stomach in 134B boiled flowers!”）
The fact remained that one wouldn’t use yarrow and comfrey on a wound if iodine were available, nor treat a systemic infection with bladderwort in preference to penicillin.
I had forgotten a lot, but as I wrote the names of the herbs, the look and the smell of each one began to come back to me—the dark, bituminous look and pleasant light smell of birch oil, the sharp tang of the mint family, the dusty sweet smell of chamomile and the astringency of bistort.
Across the table, Jamie was struggling with his own lists. A poor penman, he wrote laboriously with his crippled right hand, pausing now and then to rub the healing wound above his left elbow and mutter curses under his breath.
“Have ye lime juice on your list, Sassenach?” he inquired, looking up.
“No. Ought I to have?”
He brushed a strand of hair out of his face and frowned at the sheet of paper in front of him.
“It depends. Customarily, it would be the ship’s surgeon who provides the lime juice, but in a ship the size of the Artemis, there generally isn’t a surgeon, and the provision of foodstuffs falls to the purser. But there isn’t a purser, either; there’s no time to find a dependable man, so I shall fill that office, too.”
“Well, if you’ll be purser and supercargo, I expect I’ll be the closest thing to a ship’s surgeon,” I said, smiling slightly. “I’ll get the lime juice.”