I rubbed the back of his hand lightly with my thumb, feeling the knobs of his knuckles and the faint roughness of the scar that ran down from where his fourth finger had been.
“I feel like that all the time, Sassenach,” he said, his voice a little husky. His fingers curled over mine. “When I wake sometimes in the early morning, and I see ye there beside me. I doubt you’re real. Until I touch ye—or until ye fart.”
I yanked my hand loose and he rolled away and came up sitting, elbows hunched comfortably over his knees.
“So how is it wi’ Roger Mac?” he asked, ignoring my glare. “D’ye think he’ll ever have his voice back?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I truly don’t. But let me tell you what he told me about a man named Hector McEwan …”
He listened with great attention, stirring only to brush away wandering clouds of gnats.
“Have ye ever seen that yourself, a nighean?” he asked when I’d finished. “Blue light, as he said?”
A small, deep shiver went through me that had nothing to do with the cooling air. I looked away, to a buried past. Or one I’d tried to bury.
“I … well, yes,” I said, and swallowed. “But I thought I was hallucinating at the time, and it’s quite possible I was. I’m reasonably sure that I was actually dying, and imminent death might alter one’s perceptions.”
“Aye, it does,” he said, rather dryly. “But that’s not to say what ye see in such a state isna true.” He looked closely at my face, considering.
“Ye dinna need to tell me,” he continued quietly, and touched my shoulder. “There’s no need to live such things again, if they dinna come back of their own accord.”
“No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. I cleared my throat and took a firm grip on mind and memory. “I won’t. It’s just that I had a bad infection, and—and Master Raymond—” I wasn’t looking directly at him, but I felt his head lift suddenly at the name. “He came and healed me. I don’t have any idea how he did it, and I wasn’t thinking anything consciously. But I saw—” I rubbed a hand slowly over my forearm, seeing it again. “It was blue, the bone inside my arm. Not a vivid blue, not like that—” I gestured toward the mountain, where the evening sky above the clouds had gone the color of larkspur. “A very soft, faint blue. But it did—‘glow’ isn’t the right word, really. It was … alive.”
It had been. And I’d felt the blue spread outward from my bones, wash through me. And felt the bursting of the microbes in my system, dying like stars. The remembered sense of it lifted the hairs on my arms and neck, and filled me with a strange sensation of well-being, like warm honey being stirred.
A wild cry from the woods above broke the mood, and Jamie turned, smiling.
“Och, there’s wee Oggy. He sounds like a hunting catamount.”
I got to my feet, brushing grass off my skirt. “I think he’s the loudest child I’ve ever heard.”
As though the shriek had been a signal, I heard hooting from the hollow below, and a gang of children burst out of the trees by the creek, followed by Bree and Roger, walking slowly, heads leaning toward each other, deep in what looked like contented conversation.
“I’m going to need a bigger house,” Jamie said, meditatively.
Before he could expand on this interesting notion, though, the Murrays appeared on the path that led down from the eastern side of the Ridge, Rachel carrying Oggy—bellowing over her shoulder—and Ian behind her with a large, covered basket.
“The children?” Rachel said to Jamie. Jamie stood up, smiling, then nodded toward the clearing below.
“See for yourself, a nighean.”
Jem, Mandy, and Germain had been sorted out from their companions and were now tagging along behind Bree and Roger, amicably pushing one another.
“Oh,” Rachel said very softly, and I saw her hazel eyes go soft as well. “Oh, Jamie. Thy daughter looks so like thee—and her son as well!”
“I told ye,” Ian said, smiling down at her, and she put a hand on his arm, squeezing tight.
“Thy mother …” Rachel shook her head, unable to think of anything sufficiently descriptive of Jenny’s emotional state.
“Well, I doubt she’ll faint away,” Jamie said, getting gingerly to his feet. “She’s met the lass once before, though no the bairns. Where is she, though?” He glanced up the path that led into the woods, as though expecting his sister to materialize there as he spoke.
“She’s staying at the MacNeills’ tonight,” Rachel said, and set Oggy on the grass, where he lay squirming in a leisurely manner. “She and Cairistina MacNeill became very friendly while we were quilting, and Cairistina told us that her husband has gone to Salisbury and she was frightened at the thought of being alone at night, their home being such a distance from the nearest neighbor.”
I nodded at that. Cairistina was very young, newly married—she was Richard MacNeill’s third wife—and had come from Campbelton, near Cross Creek. Night on a mountain was very dark, and full of things unseen.
“That was very kind of Jenny,” I said.
Ian gave a brief snort of amusement. “I’ll no say my mother isna kind,” he said. “But I’ll give ye good odds that she’s staying on her own account as much as Mistress MacNeill’s.” He nodded at Oggy, who was whining, a long trail of drool hanging from his lower lip. “The laddie’s had the colic three nights runnin’ and it’s a small cabin, aye? I’d wager ye three to one she’s stretched out like a corpse on Mrs. MacNeill’s bed right now, sound asleep.”
“She walked the floor with him half the night,” Rachel said apologetically to me. “I told her I would take him, but she said, ‘Pish, and what’s a grannie for, then?’” She squatted and picked up Oggy before he could escalate to his imitation of an air-raid siren. “What does thee think of Marmaduke, Claire?”
“Of … oh, as a name for Oggy, you mean?” I hastily rearranged my face, but it was too late. Rachel laughed.
“That’s what Jenny said. Still,” she added, removing the end of her dark plait from her son’s grasping fingers, “Marmaduke Stephenson was one of the Boston Martyrs: a very weighty Friend. It would be a fine name.”
“Well, I grant ye, he wouldna easily be mistaken for someone else, if ye call him Marmaduke,” Jamie said, trying to be tactful. “And he’d learn to fight early on. But if ye mean him to be a Quaker …”
“Aye,” said Ian to Rachel. “And we’re no calling him Fear the Lord, either, lass. Maybe Fortitude, though; that’s a decent manly name.”
“Hmm,” she said, looking down her nose at her offspring. “What does thee think of Wisdom? Wisdom Murray? Wisdom Ian Murray?”
Ian laughed. “Aye, and what if the laddie should turn out to be a fool? Borrowing trouble, are ye no?”
Jamie tilted his head and squinted at Oggy, considering, then glanced at Ian, then at Rachel, and shook his head.
“Given his parents, I dinna think that’s likely. Still … have ye thought perhaps to honor your own da, Rachel? What was your father’s name?”