“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.”
77
City of Brotherly Love
Philadelphia
IAN FOUND THE HOUSE where Uncle Jamie had told him, at the end of a ragged dirt lane off the main road from Philadelphia. Uncle Jamie had said it was a poor household, and it looked it. It also looked deserted. A few early snowflakes were falling in a desultory sort of way, but there was no chimney smoke. The yard was overgrown, the roof sagged, half its shingles split or curled, and the door looked as though whoever lived there was in the habit of entering the house by kicking it in.
He swung down from his horse but paused for a moment, considering. His uncle’s instructions were clear enough, but from the things Uncle Jamie hadn’t said, it was also clear that Mrs. Hardman might have occasional male visitors of a possibly dangerous disposition, and Ian wasn’t wanting to walk into anything unexpected.
He tied the gelding loosely to a small elm sapling that leaned drunkenly over the lane and walked quietly into the brush beyond it. He meant to come up to the house from the rear and listen for sounds of occupation, but as he rounded the corner of the house, he heard the faint sound of a baby’s cry. It wasn’t coming from the house but from a dilapidated shed nearby.
No sooner had he turned in that direction than the cry ceased abruptly, cut off in mid-wail. He kent enough about babes by now to be sure that the only thing that would shut an unhappy child up so abruptly was something stuffed in its mouth, whether that was a breast, a sugar-tit, or someone’s thumb. And he didn’t think this Mrs. Hardman would be feeding her wean in the shed.
If someone had stopped the baby crying, they’d likely already seen him. He’d taken the precaution of loading and priming his pistol at the end of the lane, and now drew it.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
The words were not shouted but hissed, somewhere around the level of his knees. He glanced down, startled, and beheld a young girl, crouched under a bush, a ragged shawl around her shoulders for warmth.
“Ah … I suppose ye’d be Miss Hardman?” he asked, putting his pistol back in his belt. “Or one of them?”
“I am Patience Hardman.” She hunched warily, but met his eyes straight on. “Who is thee?”
He’d got the right place, then. He squatted companionably in front of her.
“My name is Ian Murray, lass. My uncle Jamie is a friend o’ your mother’s—if your mam’s name is Silvia, that is?”
She was still looking at him, but her face had frozen in an expression of dislike when he mentioned Uncle Jamie.
“Go away,” she said. “And tell thy uncle to stop coming here.”
He looked her over carefully, but she seemed to be in her right mind. Homely as a board fence, but sensible enough.
“I think we may be talkin’ of different men, lassie. My uncle is Jamie Fraser, of Fraser’s Ridge in North Carolina. He stayed with your family for a day or two sometime past—” He counted backward in his head and found an approximation. “It would ha’ been maybe two weeks before the battle at Monmouth; will ye have heard o’ that one?”
Evidently she had, for she scrambled out of the bush in such a hurry as to snag both limp brown hair and ratty shawl and emerged covered with dead leaves.
“Jamie Fraser? A very large Scottish man with red hair and a bad back?”
“That’s the one,” Ian said, and smiled at her. “Will your mam be at home, maybe? My uncle’s sent me to see to her welfare.”
She stood as though turned to stone, but her eyes darted toward the house behind him and then toward the shed, with something between excitement and dread.
“Who is thee talking to, Patience?” said another little girl’s voice, and what must, from her resemblance to Patience, be Prudence Hardman poked a capped head out of the shed, squinting nearsightedly. “Chastity has eaten all the apples and she will not be quiet.”
Chastity wouldn’t; there was another high-pitched scream from the shed and Prudence’s head vanished abruptly.
Not a babe, then; if Uncle Jamie had met Chastity on his visit, she might be nearly two by now.
“Is your mother in the house, then?” Ian asked, deciding that he could wait to meet Chastity.
“She is, Friend,” Patience said, and swallowed. “But she is—is occupied.”
“I’ll wait, then.”
“No! Just—I mean—thee must go away. Come back—please come back—but go now.”
“Aye?” He eyed the house curiously. He thought he heard vague sounds within, but the breeze rustling in the surrounding trees made it hard to tell what was going on. Not that I couldna guess, wi’ the lassies out here shiverin’ in the shed …
But if Silvia Hardman was entertaining a caller, it might be best to wait until the man had left. Still, it troubled him to go away and leave the wee girls in such a state. Perhaps he could feed them, at least—
While he havered, though, Chastity took things into her own hands, screaming like a catamount and apparently kicking Prudence in the shins, for Prudence shrieked, too.
“Ow! Chastity! Thee bit me!”
Patience jerked, then ran for the shed, calling, “Be quiet, be quiet!” in an urgent voice, glancing frantically over her shoulder.
The door of the house was jerked open, slamming back against the wall within, and a large man wearing nothing but unfastened breeches came out, a leather belt in his hand and fury on his face.