Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (93 page)

“Ye do wonder what ye’d take, if the house was afire,” he said, trying to be humorous.

“Aye, well,” Marsali said, tucking in the blanket wrapped around the twin she was holding. “It smells that wee bit better than sauerkraut, aye?”

Four days later…

BRIANNA TOOK A
handful of the dress she meant to wear and lifted it cautiously to her nose. She’d hung it on a peg in the airing cupboard, along with Marsali’s working dress and apron, hoping for the best. The cupboard itself was no more than a large box like a coffin stood on end, built against the bedroom wall and pierced with dozens of holes through the outside wall, to let the night air dispel as much of the scent of lampblack, varnish, ink, cooking grease, and infant spit-up as possible before the garments were resumed the next morning.

“All right?” Marsali inquired, tousled blond head emerging from her night-freshened shift.

“Well, it doesn’t smell very
much
like sauerkraut,” Bree said, inhaling strongly, and Marsali gave the breath of a laugh and reached into the cupboard, snagging her work gown, a butternut-gray homespun in a severe cut that made Brianna think privately of a Civil War uniform.

“Ye’ll be aired out fine by the time ye reach Savannah,” Marsali assured her. “And the soldiers willna care.” She handed Brianna a couple of petticoats and went on with her own dressing, fingers rapid with tapes, laces, and buttons. It was just before dawn and they were talking in whispers, not to wake the children before they had to. Downstairs, shuffling and muffled thumps and sniggers signaled Roger’s and Fergus’s preparations for the day.

The soldiers Lord John had sent were already outside; Brianna had seen them from the loft where the MacKenzies had been sleeping, a small group of men who stood together in the alley behind the shop. They’d taken up station a little distance from the house, smoking pipes that glowed briefly in the dark as they moved, and were murmuring to one another, shadowy figures noticeable as soldiers only by the long black shapes of their muskets, stacked together against a wall that had just begun to emerge from the night.

She couldn’t see them from the bedroom—window taxes being what they were, the only windows in the house were the large front windows of the printshop—but a faint scent of tobacco reached her through the holes of the airing cupboard and she exhaled sharply. It would be a long time before she quit smelling sauerkraut, but at least the reeking barrels wouldn’t be accompanying her and the kids to Savannah. Both whisky and the remaining gold, neatly repackaged as a crate of salt fish, had been discreetly spirited away to a warehouse whose owner was a Son of Liberty, and while she still had a few of the thin gold slips sewn into her clothes, it wasn’t enough gold to be really suspicious, even if someone discovered one of the slips.

Nowhere near enough to buy guns,
she thought, and shivered, though Marsali had just poked up the bedroom fire. A muffled squawk from the next room made Marsali put down the poker and hurry off, loosening her freshly donned stays as the milk surged into her breasts—Bree saw the wet patches spring out on Marsali’s shift; she could feel it in sympathetic memory, her own nipples swelling against her stays.

“Mam?” said Jemmy, sticking his head into the room. The new fire caught the gleam of his hair and shadowed his bones, and quite suddenly she saw what he would look like, grown. Quick humor and a latent fierceness showed in his face, and the sight of it struck her to the heart.

Warrior. Oh, God…

She closed her eyes and sent a quick passionate plea to the Virgin Mother.
Please! Keep him out of it!

A calming thought came, perhaps in response.
Two years.
Almost exactly two years to the Battle of Yorktown and the end of the war. Only two years. Jem was nine, and eleven would still be much too young to fight. She pushed away the sudden vision of a drummer boy…

“Yes, honey?” she said, tucking in the ends of her fichu. “Are you and Mandy ready?”

He shrugged. How was he supposed to know?

“Dad says will you need one of the pistols?” He spoke casually; it was no big deal. She’d been armed all the way from the Ridge and thought little of it—but now there were soldiers outside, enemy soldiers, waiting to take her and her children away.

“Tell him yes,” she said. “I think I’d better have one.”

Fraser’s Ridge

J
AMIE WOKE UP HARD,
his heart pounding and his mind full of shredded dreams. There was a faint memory of fury; he’d been fighting, wanting to fight someone…but it wasn’t anger pulsing through him, or not entirely…It was still black dark, the shutters closed and the air warm and bitter with the smell of ash from the smoldering hearth.

“Mmmf…” Claire stirred briefly beside him, then relaxed back into sleep with a sigh.

“Sassenach,” he whispered, and put a hand on the warm round of her hip. He felt guilt at rousing her, but his need of her was overwhelming.

“Ng?”

“I need to—” he whispered, already sliding down behind her, fumbling through the bedclothes, her night rail, his shirt—he rose up and yanked the shirt off, threw it on the floor, and then lay down again, pulled up her shift and put an arm over her, clutching her to him, urgent.

She gave a sleepy huff of surprise, but then made a small, accommodating movement of her naked backside and relaxed again, opening to him.

She was surprisingly slippery, as though she’d shared his lustful dream, and perhaps she had…He came into her as slowly as he could, but he couldn’t wait.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her hair, moving in her, unable to think, to talk…. “I have to…” She wasn’t quite awake, he could tell, but her body was compliant, yielding to his importunity. He quit talking and buried his face in her hair, holding her tight and rocking hard, her back hot against his chest and his cold skin rippling with gooseflesh as he felt the surge come and yielded to it, shuddering and gasping as it pulsed through him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, a few moments later. She reached back, groping blindly, found his leg, and patted him briefly. She yawned, stretched a little, and curled back into sleep, her bare bottom snug and warm in the damp curve of his thighs.

He fell asleep as though he’d been pitched headfirst down a well and slept without dreaming until he woke just before dawn—before the roosters.

He lay quiet, watching the faint light begin to glow between the shutters and enjoying the momentary sense of deep peace. Claire was still asleep, her breathing slow and even and her hair pouring over the pillow like smoke. The sight of her shoulder, bare where her night rail had slipped off, brought back the sense of that midnight urgency, and he felt a mingled sense of shame and exultation.

He hadn’t bothered looking for his shirt in the night, and his own shoulders were cold, the smoored fire not yet stirred. Moving carefully, so as to let her sleep while she could, he drew the quilt up over both of them, and lay still, eyes half closed.

His mind felt as lazy as his body, not forming real thoughts, but letting idle bits of fancy and memory drift through like leaves borne along on the current of a Highland burn. And among the remembered bits of dreams recalled, he saw a face. Black-rimmed spectacles, an open, searching face from the back of a book…

A face that rose above his own, without spectacles, searching, trying to fix his gaze, to make him look, look at what—

His eyes sprang open in shock. Outside, the first rooster began to crow.

“WHY DID YE
never tell me that Frank Randall looked like Black Jack?” Jamie asked abruptly.

“What?” I’d wondered what was bothering him; he’d gone out before I was dressed and without his breakfast. Now it was past noon, he hadn’t been fed lunch, and he’d walked into my surgery without hesitance or greeting to ask me
this
?

“Well…” I tried to gather my thoughts enough to frame a coherent answer; plainly he needed as much truth as I could give him. “Well, to begin with—he didn’t, really. I mean—the first time I met Jack Randall, I was startled by the resemblance”—
and a few times thereafter
—“but that seemed to wear off. It’s—it
was,
” I corrected myself, “only a superficial physical resemblance, and once I was acquainted with Jack Randall…” A surprisingly cold sensation centered itself on the back of my neck, as though the gentleman in question were standing behind me, eyes fixed on me. “He didn’t remind me of Frank at all.”

I looked him over carefully. He’d been quite as usual the night before—or more so; he’d made love to me in my sleep, silently, quickly, and vigorously, and then had clasped me to his bosom and gone instantly to sleep with a murmured “
Taing, mo ghràidh.
I’m sorry.”

I’d fallen back asleep myself, almost at once, feeling a pleasant fricative glow in my inward parts and the slow, steady thump of his heart against my back. It wasn’t that he’d never done anything like that before, but it had been some time since he had.

“Besides,” I said slowly, “you’ve seen that photo of Frank on his book. Didn’t you see the resemblance for yourself then?”

“No.” He seemed to realize that he was looming over me, and with an impatient gesture, he pulled out one of my stools and sat down.

“No,” he repeated. “And now I’m wondering why not. It’s maybe what ye say—that what…Frank is—what he was,” he corrected himself, “shows in his face. Jack Randall hid himself, but once ye’d seen him look at ye like…what he was…ye’d never see him otherwise, no matter how fine his clothes or how civil his manner.”

“Yes.” I shivered involuntarily and reached for my green shawl, wrapping it round my shoulders as though it might be some protection from the memory of evil. “But—why did the family resemblance strike you
now
?”

“Mmphm.” The three remaining fingers of his right hand drummed soundlessly on his knee, and I could feel his struggle to put what he felt into words.

“Did something…happen?” I asked cautiously, thinking of that hasty midnight coupling. That seemed the only mildly unusual event I could recall, but I failed entirely to see any connection.

Jamie sighed.

“Aye. Maybe. I dinna ken for sure. It’s just…I was dreaming.” He saw me react to that and made a slight calming gesture. “Not one of the bad ones. Just bits of nonsense. I dreamed I was reading a book—well, I
had
been reading it, just before I came to bed.”

“Frank’s book, you mean.”

“Aye. What I was reading in the dream didna make any sense, but—it went in and out, ken, like dreams do? And it began to seem that the book was talkin’ to me, and then it was the man himself—just wee bits of conversation and then I’d be reading again, or…I was somewhere else.”

He rubbed a hand hard over his face; I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to erase the dream or bring it to the surface.

“I was looking into his face—seeing his eyes behind the spectacles. Kind. Decent. Tellin’ me things about history. And then I saw Jack Randall, sitting back behind his desk, lookin’ at me, mild and civil, like he might have been askin’ did I want sugar in my tea, but what he was asking was whether I’d rather be buggered or flogged to death.”

I leaned forward and took his hand; his fingers curled round mine at once and squeezed lightly in reassurance. It
hadn’t
been “one of the bad ones,” the dreams that left him sweating and unable to be touched.

“You knew it was a dream, then?” I ventured. “You weren’t…er…living in it, I mean?”

He shook his head, his eyes on the floor.

“No, but it was then I suddenly realized how much they looked alike, and I woke up wondering why ye’d never mentioned that.”

“Frankly, I—” I smiled, despite myself, and started over. “I mean, at first, I didn’t see any need, and later, I thought you might be…upset. Or worried. To know that the man I’d been married to looked so much like Jack Randall.”

He nodded a little, considering that.

“I might have been. And as ye say—nay point, after all. Ye were mine.”

He lifted his head as he said this, and while there was warmth in his eyes, his mouth had firmed in a very determined way.

“Oh!” I said, suddenly face-to-face with exactly what I’d blindly experienced in the musky depths of the night before. He’d wakened with Frank in his mind and had promptly laid claim to me. “So
that’s
why you kept saying you were sorry!”

He gave me a look in which sheepishness was mingled with a certain defiance.

“Well, I felt bad for wakin’ ye, but…I had to—to—” He made a brief but very explicit gesture with his thumb in the palm of my hand, which brought warm blood flooding to my face.

“Oh,” I said again. I noticed that he wasn’t asking if I’d minded. A moot point, since I hadn’t. I folded my fingers around his large, warm thumb. “Well.”

He smiled at me, leaned forward, and kissed my forehead.

“Claire,” he said softly. “You are my life.
Fuil m ‘fhuil, cnàmh mo chnàimh.
” You are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone. “If Frank felt as much for ye and kent I’d taken ye from him—and he did know I had—then he had good cause to try to damage or kill me.”

Sheer astonishment silenced me for a moment.

“You think—I mean…no.” I shook my head, hard. “
No.
Even if you’re right about that book—and I
don’t
think you are—how could he possibly know that Brianna would bring it to the past and that you’d see it? Beyond that…how could anything in a book kill you?

“And besides,” I added firmly, sitting up straight and folding my hands on my knee, “whatever resemblance your dream showed you, Frank was
nothing
like Jack Randall. He was a very good man. More important, he was an historian. He couldn’t—he really couldn’t—write something that he knew was false.”

Jamie was regarding me with a slight smile.

“I notice ye’re not saying that he didna value ye as much as I do.”

I would have given a lot to be able to make an appropriate Scottish noise in response to this, but some things were beyond my capabilities. Instead, I reached out and took his maimed hand between mine, lightly tracing the thick white scar where his fourth finger had been. I cleared my throat.

“You sent me back to him,” I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking. “When you thought it would be dangerous for me and the baby to stay. He knew you weren’t dead, and didn’t tell me.” I lifted his hand and kissed it.

“I’m going to burn that bloody book.”