“It seemed to be his heart. He had a pain in his chest, his left arm, and he couldn’t breathe well, said it was like a weight on his chest, and he couldn’t get up. I got him water, though, and after a bit he seemed okay. At least he could walk, and he brushed off any suggestion that we stop and rest.”
They had separated then, Buck to search the road toward Inverness, Roger to go to Lallybroch, and—
“Lallybroch!” This time I did grab him by the arm. “You went there?”
“I did,” he said, and smiled. He clasped my hand, where it lay on his arm. “I met Brian Fraser.”
“You—but—Brian?” I shook my head in order to clear it. That made no sense.
“No, it didn’t make sense,” he said, plainly reading my thoughts from my face and smiling at the results. “We … didn’t go where—I mean when—we thought we were going. We ended in 1739.”
I stared at him for a moment, and he shrugged helplessly.
“Later,” I said firmly, and reached for his throat again, thinking, “In medias res.” What the devil did McEwan mean by that?
I could hear distant childish shouts from the direction of the creek, and the high, cracked screech of a hawk in the tall snag at the far side of our clearing; I could just see him—or her—from the corner of my eye: a large dark shape like a torpedo on a dead branch. And I was beginning to hear—or to think I heard—the thrum of blood in Roger’s neck, a faint sound, separate from the thump of his pulse. And the fact that I was evidently hearing it through my fingertips seemed shockingly ordinary.
“Talk to me a bit more,” I suggested, as much to avoid hearing what I thought I heard as in order to loosen up his larynx. “About anything.”
He hummed for a moment, but that made him cough, and I dropped my hand so he could turn his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “Bobby Higgins was just telling me the Ridge is growing—a lot of new families, I hear?”
“Like weeds,” I said, replacing my hand. “We came back to find that at least twenty new families had settled down, and there’ve been three more just since we came back from Savannah, where the winds of war had briefly blown us.”
He nodded, a slight frown on his face, and gave me a sidelong green glance. “I don’t suppose any of the new settlers is a minister?”
“No,” I said promptly. “Is that what you—I mean, you still think you—”
“I do.” He looked up at me, a little shyly. “I’m not fully ordained yet; I’ll need to take care of that, somehow. But when we decided to come back, we talked—Bree and I. About what we might do. Here. And …” He lifted both shoulders, palms on his knees. “That’s what I might do.”
“You were a minister here before,” I said, watching his face. “Do you really have to be formally ordained to do it again?”
He didn’t have to think; he’d done his thinking long since.
“I do,” he said. “I don’t feel … wrong … about having buried or married folk before, or christened them. Someone had to do it, and I was all there was. But I want it to be right.” He smiled a little. “It’s maybe like the difference between being handfast and being properly married. Between a promise and a vow. Even if ye ken ye’d never break the promise, ye want—” He struggled for the words. “Ye want the weight of the vow. Something to stand at your back.”
A vow. I’d made a few of those. And he was right; all of them—even those I’d broken—had meant something, had weight. And a few of them had stood at my back, and were still standing.
“That does make a difference,” I said.
“Ye know, ye were right,” he said, sounding surprised, and smiled at me. “It is easy to talk to a doctor—especially one who’s got ye by the throat. D’ye want to give McEwan’s method a try, then?”
I straightened my back and flexed my hands, rather self-consciously.
“It can’t hurt,” I said, hoping I was right. “You know—” I added hesitantly, and felt Roger’s Adam’s apple bob below my hand.
“I know,” he said gruffly. “No expectations. If something happens … well, it does. If not, I’m no worse off.”
I nodded, and felt gently about, fingertips probing. The tracheotomy I’d performed to save his life had left a smaller scar in the hollow of his throat, a slight depression about an inch long. I passed my thumb over that, feeling the healthy rings of cartilage above and below. The lightness of the touch made him shiver suddenly, tiny goosebumps stippling his neck, and he gave the breath of a laugh.
“Goose walking on my grave,” he said.
“Stamping about on your throat, more like,” I said, smiling. “Tell me again what Dr. McEwan said. Everything you can remember.”
I hadn’t taken my hand away, and I felt the lurch of his Adam’s apple as he cleared his throat hard.
“He prodded my throat—much as you’re doing,” he added, smiling back. “And he asked me if I knew what a hyoid bone was. He said”—Roger’s hand rose involuntarily toward his throat but stopped a few inches from touching it—“that mine was an inch or so higher than usual, and that if it had been in the normal place, I’d be dead.”
“Really,” I said, interested. I put a thumb just under his jaw and said, “Swallow, please.”
He did, and I touched my own neck and swallowed, still touching his.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “It’s a small sample size, and granted, there may be differences attributable to gender—but he may well be right. Perhaps you’re a Neanderthal.”
“A what?” He stared at me.
“Just a joke,” I assured him. “But it’s true that one of the differences between the Neanderthals and modern humans is the hyoid. Most scientists think they hadn’t one at all, and therefore couldn’t speak, but my Uncle Lamb said— You rather need one for coherent speech,” I added, seeing his blank look. “It anchors the tongue. My uncle didn’t think they could have been mute, so the hyoid must have been located differently.”
“How extremely fascinating,” Roger said politely.
I cleared my own throat and circled his neck once again.
“Right. And after saying about your hyoid—what did McEwan do? How, exactly, did he touch you?”
Roger tilted his head back slightly and, reaching up, adjusted my grip, moving my hand down an inch and gently spreading my fingers.
“About like that,” he said, and I found that my hand was now covering—or at least touching—all the major structures of his throat, from larynx to hyoid.
“And then …?” I was listening intently—not to his voice, but to the sense of his flesh. I’d had my hands on his throat dozens of times, particularly during his recovery from the hanging, but what with one thing and another I hadn’t touched it in several years—until today. I could feel the solid muscles of his neck, firm under the skin, and I felt his pulse, strong and regular—a little fast, and I realized just how important this might be to him. I felt a qualm at that; I had no idea what Hector McEwan might have done—or what Roger might have imagined he’d done—and still less notion how to do anything myself.