Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (76 page)

“Murtagh?” Jamie glanced at the beads and furrowed his brow a bit. “But Da must ha’ kent how he felt about her—about Mam.”

Jenny nodded, rubbing a thumb over the crucifix and the beautifully sculpted, tortured body of Christ. The yaffle called, faint and distant, beyond the maple grove.

“He could see I thought the same thing—why would he send Murtagh on such an errand? But he said he hadna meant to, only he’d told Murtagh what was in his mind, and Murtagh asked to go. Da said he didna want to let him, but he couldna very well go off himself and leave Mam about to burst with Willie and not even a solid roof over her head yet—he’d laid the cornerstones and started the chimneys, but nay more. And—” She lifted one shoulder. “He loved Murtagh, too—more than his ain brother.”

“God, I miss the old bugger,” Jamie said impulsively.

Jenny glanced at him and smiled ruefully. “So do I. I wonder sometimes if he’s with them now—Mam and Da.”

That notion startled Jamie—he’d never thought of it—and he laughed, shaking his head. “Well, if he is, I suppose he’s happy.”

“I hope that’s the way of it,” Jenny said, growing serious. “I always wished he could ha’ been buried with them—wi’ the family—at Lallybroch.”

Jamie nodded, his throat suddenly tight. Murtagh lay with the fallen of Culloden, burnt and buried in some anonymous pit on that silent moor, his bones mingled with the others. No cairn for those who loved him to come and leave a stone to say so.

Jenny laid a hand on his arm, warm through the cloth of his sleeve.

“Dinna mind it,
a bràthair,
” she said softly. “He had a good death, and you with him at the end.”

“How would you know it was a good death?” Emotion made him speak more roughly than he meant, but she only blinked once, and then her face settled again.

“Ye told me, eejit,” she said dryly. “Several times. D’ye not recall that?”

He stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending.

“I told ye? How? I dinna ken what happened.”

Now it was her turn to be surprised.

“Ye’ve forgotten?” She frowned at him. “Aye, well…it’s true ye were off your heid wi’ fever for a good ten days when they brought ye home. Ian and I took it in turn to sit with ye—as much to stop the doctor takin’ your leg off as anything else. Ye can thank Ian ye’ve still got that one,” she added, nodding sharply at his left leg. “He sent the doctor away; said he kent well ye’d rather be dead.” Her eyes filled abruptly with tears, and she turned away.

He caught her by the shoulder and felt her bones, fine and light as a kestrel’s under the cloth of her shawl.

“Jenny,” he said softly. “Ian didna want to be dead. Believe me. I did, aye…but not him.”

“No, he did at first,” she said, and swallowed. “But ye wouldna let him, he said—and he wouldna let you, either.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, roughly. He took hold of it and kissed it, her fingers cold in his hand.

“Ye dinna think ye had anything to do with it?” he asked, rising to his feet and smiling down at her. “For either of us?”

“Hmph,” she said, but she looked modestly pleased.

The goats had moved away a little, brown backs smooth amid the tussocked grass. One of them had a bell; he could hear the small
clank!
of it as she moved. The yaffles had moved off as well—he caught the flash of scarlet as one flew low across the field and disappeared into the black mouth of the trail.

He let a moment go by, two, and then shifted his weight and made a small menacing noise in the back of his throat.

“Aye, aye,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes at him. “Of course I’ll tell ye. I had to fettle my mind, first, ken?” She rearranged her skirts and settled herself more firmly. “Aye, then—this is the way of it. As ye told it to me, at least.

“Ye said”—her brows drew together with the effort of careful remembrance—“that ye’d fought your way across the field in a fury and when ye stopped because ye had to breathe, you—you were…dismayed…to find ye weren’t dead yet.”

“Aye,” he said softly, and with a deep sense of fear, felt the day well up in him. Cold, it had been bitter cold in the wind and rain, but he’d been ablaze with the fighting; he hadn’t felt it ’til he stopped. “What then? That’s what I dinna ken…”

She drew a deep, audible breath.

“Ye were behind the government lines. There were cannon behind ye—pointing the other way, aye? Toward…our men.”

“Aye. I could see—I could…see them. Lying dead and dying, in windrows.”

“Windrows?” She sounded a little startled, and he looked down, still feeling the chill of Culloden in his hands and feet.

“They fell by lines,” he said, his own voice sounding remote and reasonable, detached. “The English guns, the muskets—they’ve a range of…I dinna mind it now, but that’s where we fell, at the end of that range. There were men blown up and crushed by the cannon, but most of it was the muskets. Bayonets later—I heard that, didna see.” He swallowed, and keeping his voice steady asked, “What did I say happened then?”

She exhaled through her nose, and he saw she had closed her hand on the rosary, clenching it as though to draw strength from the beads.

“Ye said ye couldna think what to do, but there was a cannon nearby and the crew had their backs to ye. So ye turned to go after the nearest man—but there was a knot of redcoats between you and the cannon, and when ye wiped the sweat out of your eyes, ye saw one of them was Jack Randall.” Her free hand made an unobtrusive sign of the horns, then folded into a fist.

He remembered. Remembered and felt a lurch in his wame as the image he’d seen in dreams met and merged with memory.

“He saw me,” he whispered. “He stood stock-still and so did I. The shock of it—I couldna make myself move.”

“And Murtagh…” Jenny’s voice came soft.

“I sent him back,” he whispered, seeing his godfather’s face, creased in stubborn refusal. “I made him go. Made him take Fergus and the others—I said he must see them safe to Lallybroch, because…because…”

“Because ye couldn’t,” she said, low-voiced.

“I couldn’t,” he said, and swallowed the growing lump in his throat.

“But he was there, ye said,” Jenny prompted after a moment. “On the field. Murtagh.”

“Aye. Aye, he was.” He’d seen the sudden movement, a jerk of the frozen scene before him, and lifted his eyes from Jack Randall’s face to look, and saw Murtagh running…

And once more the dream came down on him and he was in it. Cold. So cold the voice froze in his throat, rain and sweat plastering wet cloth to his body and the icy wind cutting through his bones as easily as through his clothes. He tried—he had tried—to call out, to stop Murtagh before he reached the English soldiers. But it would have taken more than muskets and British cannon to stop Murtagh FitzGibbons Fraser, let alone Jamie’s voice, and he didn’t stop, bounding over the tumps of the moor grass, water bursting like broken glass under his feet as he went.

“Captain Randall spoke to ye, ye said…”

“Kill me.”
He heard his own voice whisper the words. “He asked me to kill him.”

My heart’s desire.
The words lay like drops of lead in his ear. The wind had been whistling past his head, whipping the hair out of its binding and across his face. But he’d heard that, he knew he had, he hadn’t dreamed it…

But his eyes had been on Murtagh. There was movement, confusion, someone came toward him, he saw the dark blade of a bayonet, wet with rain or blood or mud, and he pushed it aside and suddenly it was a fight, with two of them pulling at him, bashing, trying to knock him down.

A sudden sound surprised him and he opened his eyes, disoriented, and realized that he’d made the noise, it was the sound he’d made when something took his left leg out from under him, a grunt of impact, impatience, he had to get up…

“And Captain Randall reached down to ye, then, where ye lay on the ground…”

“And I had my dirk in my hand and I—” He broke off and looked down at his sister, urgent. “Did I kill him? Did I say I did?”

She was watching him closely, a look of deep concern on her face. He made an impatient gesture, and she gave him a reproving look. No, she wouldn’t lie to him, he kent better than that…

“Ye said ye did. Ye said it over and over…”

“I said I killed him, over and over?”

Despite herself, she gave a small shudder. “No. That it was hot. The—his—blood. ‘Hot,’ ye kept saying, ‘God, it was so hot…’ ”

“Hot.” For a moment, that made no sense, and then he caught a glimpse of it: the dim sense of darkness leaning over him, the brush of wet wool across his face, effort, so much effort to raise his arm one more time, trembling, he saw drops of clean rain run down the blade, over his shaking hand, and effort, pushing, pushing up and the thick resisting, rasping cloth, momentary hardness,
push, God damn it,
then a deep, startling heat that had spilled over his frozen hand, his wind-chilled arm. He’d been desperately grateful for the warmth, he remembered that—but he could not remember the blow itself.

“Murtagh,” he said, and the sense of blood-heat left him as suddenly as it had come, the chilly wind in his ears. “Did I say what happened to Murtagh?” He gave a sigh of pain, exasperation, desolation. “Why would ye not go when I
told
ye, ye scabbit auld bugger?”

“He did,” Jenny said, unexpectedly. “He took the men as far as the road and set them on their way. They said so, when they came back to Lallybroch. But then he went back—for you.”

“For me.” He didn’t have to close his eyes now, he saw it; he’d felt it in his own back, seeing the jolt of Murtagh’s knife, up hard, aiming for the captain’s kidney. Randall had dropped like a rock—hadn’t he? But then how was he standing later…and then the others were all on them.

He’d been knocked flat onto his face and someone had stepped on his back, kicked him in the head, a gun-butt had struck him in the ribs and knocked his breath out…There was shouting all around and the sense of ice was creeping up his body—of course, he’d been badly wounded but hadn’t known it, was slowly bleeding to death. But all he could think of was Murtagh, that he must reach Murtagh…He’d crawled. He remembered seeing the water come up between his fingers as his hand pressed down and the tough black prickle of wet heather as he grasped it, pulling himself along…his kilt was soaked from falling, heavy and dragging between his legs, hindering…

“I found him,” he said, and took a breath that shook in his lungs. “Something happened—the soldiers were gone, I dinna ken how long it took—from one breath to the next, is how it felt.” His godfather had been lying a few yards away from him, curled up like a babe asleep. But he hadn’t been asleep—nor dead. Not yet. Jamie’d gathered him up into his arms, seen the terrible dented wound that had caved in his temple, the blood pumping black from a gash in his neck. But seen too the beauty, the lightening of Murtagh’s face as he opened his eyes to see Jamie holding him.

“He told me that it didna hurt to die,” Jamie said. His voice was hoarse and he cleared his throat. “He touched my face and said not to be afraid.”

He’d remembered that—but now he remembered, too, the sense of sudden, overwhelming peace. The lightness. The exultation that had come back so strangely in his dream. Nothing mattered any longer. It was over. He’d bent his head and kissed Murtagh’s mouth, laid his own forehead against the bloody, tangled hair, and given up his soul to God.

“But—” He opened his eyes—didn’t recall closing them—and turned to Jenny, urgent. “But he came back! Randall. He wasna dead, he came back!”

Black, a black thing, man-shaped, upright against a sky gone white and blind. Jamie’s hands curled into fists, so sudden the nails bit his palms.

“He came back!”

Jenny didn’t speak and didn’t move, but her eyes were fixed on him, urging him silently to remember. And he did.

His limbs had gone weak and he’d lost the feeling in his leg altogether. Without meaning it, he’d fallen to the ground, losing his hold on Murtagh’s body. Was lying flat on his back, still able to feel the rain on his face but nothing else, his sight gone. He didn’t care about the black man, about anything. The peace of death was upon him. Pain and fear had gone and even hate had seeped away.

He’d closed his eyes again now, seeing it, and imagined that he felt Murtagh’s hand, hard and callused, still holding his as they lay on the ground.

“Did I kill him?” he whispered, more to himself than to Jenny. “I did…I ken I did…but how…”

The blood. The hot blood.

“The blood—it spilled down my arm, and then I…I wasna there anymore. But when I woke, my eyes were sealed shut wi’ dried blood and that’s what made me think I was dead—I couldna see anything but a sort of dark-red light. But then later I couldna find a wound on my head. It was
his
blood blinding me. And he was lyin’ on me, on my leg—”

He’d opened his eyes, still explaining it to himself, and found that he was sitting on the ground, the callused hand clinging tight to his was his sister’s, and tears were running silently down her face as she watched him.

“Och,” he said, and rising to his knees gathered her off her rock and into his arms. “Dinna weep,
a leannan.
It’s over.”

“That’s what
you
think, is it?” she said, voice muffled in his shirt. She was right, he knew that. But she held him tight. And slowly, slowly the morning came back.

They sat for a little while, not speaking. The sun had come well above the treetops by now, and while the air was still fresh and sweet, there was no longer any chill in it.

“Aye, well,” he said, at last, standing up. “Do ye still want to pray?” For she still held the pearl rosary, dangling from one hand. He didn’t wait for her reply but reached into his shirt and drew out the wooden rosary that he wore about his neck.

“Oh, ye’ve got your old beads after all,” she said, surprised. “Ye didna have your rosary in Scotland, so I thought ye’d lost it. Meant to make ye a new one, but there wasna time, what with Ian…” She lifted one shoulder, the gesture encompassing the whole of the terrible months of Ian’s long dying.

He touched the beads, self-conscious. “Aye, well…I had, in a way of speaking. I…gave it to William. When he was a wee lad, and I had to leave him at Helwater. I gave him the beads for something to keep—to…remember me by.”