Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (18 page)

“D’ye mean to read it through from beginning to end, like the Bible?” he asked. “Or will ye just wait ’til someone comes to ye with blue spots and look that up?”

“Oh, both,” I assured him, weighing the chunky little book in my hand. “It may have new treatments to suggest for things I recognize—but it undoubtedly describes things I’ve never seen or heard of, too.”

“May I see it again?” He held out a hand, and I carefully laid the book in it. He opened it at random, read…“Trypanosomiasis.” His eyebrows rose. “Can ye do anything about trypanosomiasis, Sassenach?”

“Well, no,” I admitted. “But—on the off chance that I should encounter trypanosomiasis, at least I’d know what it was, and that might save the patient from being subjected to an ineffective or dangerous treatment.”

“Aye, and give him time to write his will and summon a priest, too,” he said, closing the book and handing it back.

“Mm,” I said, not really wanting to dwell on the possibility—well, the dead certainty, in fact—of diagnosing fatal conditions I couldn’t treat. “What about your books? Do they look interesting?” I nodded toward the stack of thick paperbacks, and his face lit up. He picked up the first volume and riffled the pages, slowly, then turned back to the first page and read in a husky voice:

“Concerning Hobbits. This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”

“That’s just the Prologue,” I assured him. “You could skip that, if you like.”

He shook his head, eyes fixed on the page, smiling.

“If the author thought it was worth his writing it down, then it’s worth my reading it. I dinna mean to miss a single word.”

A sharp pang struck me then, seeing the reverential way in which he handled the book, turning over pages with a delicate forefinger. A book—any book—had a meaning well beyond its contents for a man who’d lived years at a time with little or no access to the printed word, and only the memory of stories to provide him and his companions escape from desperate circumstances.

“Have ye read these, Sassenach?” he asked, looking up.

“No, though I’ve read
The Hobbit,
by the same author. Bree and I read that one together when she was in the sixth grade—about twelve years old, I mean.”

“Ah. So ye wouldna say these are lewd books?”

“What? No, not at all,” I said, laughing. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“Nothing, from the cover—I’ve never seen so much printing on the outside of a book—but ye canna tell, can ye?” He closed the book with obvious reluctance. “I was thinking, we might read these in the evenings, maybe everyone taking it in turn to read a chapter. Jem and Germain are old enough to manage it. D’ye think Frances can read?”

“I know she can. Her sister taught her, she said.” I rose and came over to him, leaning against his shoulder to look at
The Fellowship of the Ring.
“That’s a wonderful idea.” We had done that with Jenny and Ian during the brief months of our early marriage spent at Lallybroch: passed firelit hours of peace and happiness in the evenings while one person or another read aloud and the others knitted stockings or mended clothes or small bits of furniture. The rosy vision of such evenings here, our own family in our own home, made my heart glow in my chest.

He made a low Scottish noise indicating content and set the book down, next to the hardcover book Bree had brought for herself. Frank’s book. My already tenderized heart squeezed a little, at once happy and sad that she had brought it to remember him, to bring him with her into this new life.

Jamie saw me looking at the book and made another Scottish noise, this one indicating cautious interest. I nodded at
The Soul of a Rebel.
“Are you going to read that one?”

“I dinna ken,” he admitted, glancing at it. “Have
you
read it, Sassenach?”

“No.” I felt a small qualm at the admission. The fact was that while I’d read all of Frank’s articles, books, and essays during what I thought of as our first marriage, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read any of the books he’d written during our second go, save a brief look at one that dealt with the aftermath of Culloden, when I began to search for the men of Lallybroch.

“This one was published after I…came back,” I said, my throat tight. “It was the last book he wrote. I’ve not even seen it before.” I wondered, for an instant, whether Bree had picked that one because the photograph of Frank on it was what he’d looked like the last time she saw him, or whether she’d chosen it mostly because of the title.

Jamie caught the tone of my voice and looked sharply at me, but he said nothing, and picked up Mandy’s
Green Eggs and Ham
for further perusal. Jem had taken his own special book,
The Scientific American Boy,
off to bed with him. He was probably reading it to Germain and Fanny by firelight. Nothing I could do about that, other than hope it didn’t include step-by-step instructions for building a trebuchet.

IT WAS A WEEK
later when we heard the rest.

Fanny and Germain had gone up to Ian’s place to help comb Jenny’s goats. Jemmy, being barred from this occupation on account of a sprained thumb, and never liking to be a bystander, had decided to stay at home and play chess with Jamie.

Roger was picking out “Scarborough Fair” on a simple sort of dulcimer that he’d made, a counterpoint to the similarly rudimentary conversations that swirled slowly through the kitchen. By the time Bree and I had kneaded tomorrow’s dough and put it to rise, set a haunch of venison to soak in herbs and vinegar, and debated whether the floor need be mopped or only swept, the room had grown quiet, though. The chess match had ended—Jamie, by heroic effort, had managed to lose—the dulcimer had fallen silent, and Mandy and Jemmy both had fallen asleep, slumped like bags of dried beans in the corners of the settle.

By unspoken consent, the four adults gathered together around the table, with four cups and a bottle of decent red wine—the gift of Michael Lindsay for my help in stitching up a couple of long wounds in the flank of his horse, these the result of a run-in with a bear.

“Your dulcimer sounds bonnie, Roger Mac,” Jamie said, raising his cup toward the instrument, this now laid on top of the simples cupboard for safety. Roger raised his eyebrows, surprised.

“You…can make it out?” he said. “I mean—ye ken it’s a song?”

“No,” Jamie said, surprised in turn. “Was it a song? The sound it makes is nice, though. Like wee bells ringing.”

“It’s a song from…our time,” Brianna said, a little hesitant, and glanced at the children.

“It’s all right,” Roger assured her. “The lyrics to that one could have come from any time from the Middle Ages on.”

“That’s good. We have to be careful,” Bree said, with a half smile at me. “We’d just as soon not have Mandy singing ‘Twist and Shout’ in church.”

“Well, not in our church,” Roger said, “though there are certainly more…um…athletic churches now in which that would be more or less appropriate. I wonder if there are any snake-handling churches in the area,” he added, suddenly interested. “I don’t know when that started.”

“Snakes in church…on purpose?” Jamie said dubiously. “Why the devil would anyone do that?”

“Mark 16:17,” Roger said. “
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
They do it—or will do it—to prove their faith,” he explained. “Pick up rattlesnakes and cottonmouths with their bare hands. In church.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie said, and crossed himself.

“Exactly,” Roger said, nodding. “Anything in the Bible’s safe,” he said to Bree, “but we maybe don’t want to dwell on things that might suggest more modern things.”

I had glanced involuntarily at my hands when Roger had quoted the Bible verse, but looked up at this. Jamie looked blank.

Bree took a deep breath, looking once more at the children.

“It’s not that we want them to forget,” she said quietly. “There were—are, will be—people and things they loved from…our time. And we don’t know whether they might sometime…eventually…go back. But we have to be careful which memories from that time we keep among us, talk about. Remember.” I saw her long throat bob slightly as she swallowed. “It
probably
wouldn’t cause any trouble if Mandy told people about toilets, for instance—especially not if I build one,” she added, breaking into a brief smile. “But there are other things.”

“Aye,” said Jamie, softly. “I suppose there are.” He laid a hand on my thigh, and I covered it. He could see what I saw: the look on their faces, Roger and Brianna both. I’d seen it in the days near the end of World War II; he’d seen it in the months and years after Culloden. The look of exiles, necessity covering mourning, bravery turning away from memories that would never be left behind, no matter how deeply they were buried.

There was a long moment of silence. Jamie cleared his throat.

“I ken
why
ye came back,” he said. “But how?”

The sheer practicality of the question broke the brief spell of regret. Bree and Roger looked at each other, then at us.

“Is there more wine?” Roger asked.

“WE DIDN’T KNOW
whether you can move through both time
and
space,” Bree explained, over a fresh glass. “We don’t know anyone who’s done that, and this didn’t seem like a good time to experiment.”

“I expect not,” I said, rather faintly. Most of the time, I managed not to remember what stepping into…
that…
was like, but the memory was there, all right. Like seeing something big and dark cruising just under the water, and you in a small, small boat on an endless sea.

“So, that decision was easy enough,” Roger said, with a grimace indicating that “easy” was a relative term. “We’d have to make the voyage from Scotland to America, regardless. It was partly a matter of whether the passage through the stones might be better from the stone circle near Inverness, or the one on Ocracoke.”

“People died on Ocracoke, coming through,” Bree said quietly, putting her hand on Roger’s. “Wendigo Donner told you so, didn’t he, Mama?”

“He did.” My own throat felt tight, as much from the memories Donner’s name conjured up as from other associations with the word “Ocracoke,” none of them good. Bree was very pale, and I thought she had her own memories of the place; she had been held prisoner there by Stephen Bonnet.

“And even those that didn’t die had—er—anomalies,” Roger said, and looked at me. “Otter-Tooth—Robert Springer. He meant for his entire group to go back to…when? The middle of the sixteenth century, earlier? A long way, anyway. He made it farther back than any of the rest, but still not as far as he meant to go. The point, though, is that the travel wasn’t the same for the members of the group.”

“We thought that might be because they went through one at a time, walking a pattern and chanting,” Bree put in. “We”—she gestured briefly at the sleeping children—“all came together, holding on to one another. That might have made a difference.”

“And we
did
come through Ocracoke together before,” Roger added. “If we did it once, we could maybe do it again.”

“So it came down to a question of ships, no?” Jamie had been sitting, intent, fingers tapping lightly against his thigh, but now straightened up. “Would there be a great difference, did ye think? Between a ship built in 1739 and one built in 1775 or so?”

“Yes,” Brianna said, with some emphasis. “Ships got bigger and faster—but weather is weather, and if you run into an iceberg or a hurricane”—she nodded at me—“it doesn’t matter that much whether you’re in a rowboat or the
Titanic.
”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jamie agreed, and I laughed. I’d told him—briefly—about the
Titanic
.

“From your point of view, a floating plank on the trout pond would be just as bad as the
Queen Mary
—that’s a
really
big ship.”

“Aye, well, I expect the food would be better on the latter,” he said, unperturbed by my teasing. “And as long as I had your wee stabbers in my face, I could choose on that basis. So, did ye ken the weather changed a great deal in forty years?” he asked, returning the conversation to Bree, who shook her head.

“Not the storms and wind-type weather—I mean, it might have, but we’d have no way of knowing that. What we
did
know, though, was the political weather.”

“The war,” Roger said, correctly interpreting my blank look. “The British were—I mean, they
are
—blockading and interrupting trade and seizing American ships right and left these days. What if we chose the wrong ship and ended up being sunk or captured, or me being pressed into the British navy, leaving Bree and the kids to decide whether to go through the stones by themselves, or stay in Jamaica or wherever and try to find me?”

“That’s sensible,” Jamie said. “So ye took ship in 1739, then. How was it?”

“Horrible,” Bree said promptly, just as Roger said, “Terrible!” They looked at each other and laughed, though with an undertone that belied their mirth; it was the slightly nervous laughter of survivors who weren’t yet entirely sure they’d made it.

They’d traveled on a brig called the
Kermanagh,
out of Inverness, to Edinburgh, where they’d found passage on the
Constance,
a small merchant ship, headed for Charles Town.

“No staterooms,” Roger said. “Just a wee nook in the hold, between the water barrels and stacks of chests full of cloth: linen, muslin, woolens, and silks. The smell was pretty strong—fuller’s earth and sizing and dyes and urine, ken?—but it could have been worse. The people at the other end of the hold were squashed between crates of salt fish and barrels of gin. With the fumes, they were mostly comatose, so far as we could tell in the dark.”

“They were lucky, if so,” Brianna said ruefully. “We hit four—not one, not two, not three, but
four
—storms along the way. Between being sure we were going to the bottom any minute and caroming off the cargo every other minute—except for Mandy, we were all bruised everywhere. I kept her in my lap pretty much the whole trip, with my cloak wrapped around us both, for warmth.”

Jamie looked slightly green, merely listening to this, and I had to admit to feeling a sympathetic lurch of the insides myself.

“What did you eat?” I asked, in hopes of stabilizing myself and the conversation.

“Cold parritch,” Roger said with a shrug. “Mostly. Some cold bacon, too. And neeps. Lots of neeps.”

“
Raw
neeps?” I asked.

“Oh, come on,” Bree protested. “They’re just like apples, except not sweet. And I brought apples and raisins, too,
and
carrots, and a jar of boiled spinach and one of pickles—and we got one of the casks of salt fish…”

“Oh, my God,” said Roger, with feeling. “I thought I was going to die of thirst after eating
one
of them…”

“No one told ye to soak them?” Jamie said, grinning.

“We had cheese, too,” Bree said, but it was clear she was fighting a losing battle.

“Well, the cheese wasn’t that bad, if you washed it down with gin…you ever seen a cheese mite, up close?”

“
Could
ye see them?” Jamie asked, interested. “I’ve been in a ship’s hold more than once and I couldna see my hand in front of my face.”

“Aye,” Roger said. “We couldn’t have an open light in the hold, of course, so the only time we
had
light was when they opened the hatch cover. Which they did whenever the weather was fine,” he added, with an attempt at fairness.

“That doesna sound sae bad,” Jamie said. “Ye dinna even notice cheese mites, if ye’re hungry. And raw neeps are very filling…”

Bree made a small noise of amusement; I didn’t. He was teasing, but not joking. I recognized the vivid memory of long years of near-starvation in the Highlands after Culloden, and something not far from it in Ardsmuir Prison.

“How long were you at sea?” I asked.

“Seven weeks, four days, and thirteen and a half hours,” Brianna said. “It was a pretty quick trip, thank God.”

“Aye, it was,” Roger agreed. “The last storm hit us near the coast, though, and we had to come ashore at Savannah. I didn’t think I’d get this lot onto another boat”—he waved casually at his wife and children—“but then we asked just how far it was, and faced with the prospect of walking five hundred miles…we found another boat.”

This one was a fishing boat. “An open boat, thank God,” Bree said fervently. “We slept on deck.”

“So ye came to the stones at last, then,” Jamie said. “How was it?”

“We almost didn’t make it,” Roger said quietly. He looked at the children, asleep on the settle. Mandy had fallen over and was sprawled on her face, limp as Esmeralda. “It was Mandy who got us through—and you,” he added, raising his eyes to Jamie with a slight smile.

“Me?”

“You wrote a book,” Bree said softly, looking at him. “
A Grandfather’s Tales.
And you thought to put a copy in the box with your letters.”