“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.