William
PostScriptum: Such was my Sense of Disquiet, I undertook to try to sketch Major Richardson’s Likeness, in Case he should seek you out. He has a most undistinguished Face; the only Distinction I remarked in it is that his Ears are placed unevenly—possibly not to the Extent in which they appear in this crude Sketch, but if he is telling the Truth, you may perhaps recognize him, should he ride up to your Door one Day, and be on your Guard.
BRIANNA’S HANDS HAD GROWN sweaty in the reading, and a trickle of perspiration ran down the side of her neck. She knuckled it absently away and wiped her wet hand on her skirt before unfolding the smaller paper.
It was a crude sketch, a face-on portrait with the ears comically oversized and attached asymmetrically to the head, like butterflies about to take flight. She smiled for an instant, and then looked closer at the face between those ears. It wasn’t distinctive at all—which might have made the drawing better than it otherwise might have been, she thought, frowning. There was simply nothing complicated about the major’s very ordinary face, though she was pleased to see that William did indeed have at least some basic skill in drawing: he’d added a deep chiaroscuro to the left side of the face and quick thumb-shading to add hollows beneath the small, clever-looking eyes that …
She stopped, something tickling at her brain, and looked closer. Could anyone actually have ears that noticeably off-kilter? Big ears were one thing, but displaced ears … Perhaps if the man had had an accident that severed one ear and a surgeon had sewed it back on awry … The notion made her smile, despite her uneasiness, but another thought was pushing up behind the first, triggered by the thought of surgery. Plastic surgery.
She looked again, closer, at that very ordinary face, lacking most of the normal lines of expression. Alarm was flooding through her, even before her mind had dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s.
She felt suddenly ill and sat down abruptly, eyes closed. She hadn’t eaten lunch and now felt nauseated on an empty stomach. Common with morning sickness, her mother had said—but this wasn’t morning sickness. She opened her eyes and looked again.
And this time she breathed cold air smelling of pine and heather and burning rubber and hot metal and the acrid ghost of gunpowder. Remembered the hail-like sound of shotgun pellets pattering through gorse and heather. And the warm, greasy feel of an old wool cap in her hand, pulled off the head of a man whose face she hadn’t quite seen, as he tried to kidnap Jem and Mandy from the dark dooryard of Lallybroch. But now she saw him plain and saw through his disguise. Both of them.
Someone will come.
She leaned over and threw up.
ROGER WAS SITTING under a tree on the creek bank, theoretically writing a sermon about the nature of the Holy Trinity but in actuality hypnotized by the clear brown water gurgling past, letting random quotes about streams and water and eternity roll round inside his skull like rocks being dragged downstream, clacking into each other as they went.
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he murmured, trying it out. He wasn’t worried about plagiarizing words that hadn’t been written yet. Besides, Davy Caldwell had assured him that quotation was the backbone of many good sermons—and a good place to start, if you found yourself without a thought in your head.
“Which is the case, roughly nine times out of ten,” Davy had said, reaching for a mug of beer. “And the tenth time, ye should write your brilliantly original thought down and put it aside and read it through next day, to be sure ye’re not talking out your arse.”
“I always thought Ralph Waldo Emerson was talking out his ass, but surely you aren’t going to say that in your next sermon, are you?”
“What?” He looked up from his notebook to see Bree making her careful way down the bank, and his heart lifted at the sight of her. She looked pregnant.
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you,” he said.
“What?” she said, startled. “Who said that?”
“Should I be hurt that you didn’t think it was me?” he said, laughing. “It’s A. A. Milne. From Winnie-the-Pooh, if you can believe it.”
“At this point,” she said, and sat down, sighing heavily, “I’ll believe anything. Look at this.”
She handed him an odd-looking drawing of a man’s head, the sheet showing the marks of having been folded.
“My brother sent it to me,” she said, and smiled, despite her apparent uneasiness. “He’s right, it does feel strange to say it. ‘Brother,’ I mean.”
“What is it? Or rather, who?” He could see what it was; a quick sketch of a man’s head, done in heavy graphite pencil. He frowned at it. “And what’s wrong with him?”
“Well, there’s a pair of good questions.” She took a deep breath and settled herself. “That’s a drawing of a man named Ezekiel Richardson. William says he’s a turncoat—started with the British, switched to the Continentals. He’s also some kind of skunk, who’s tried to do William harm of various kinds, but hasn’t yet succeeded. Does he look familiar to you?”
Roger glanced up at her, puzzled.
“No. Why should he?” He returned his gaze to the paper and slowly traced the outline of the face. “His ears aren’t quite straight, but I suppose William doesn’t have quite your artistic talent.”
She shook her head.
“No. Not that. Try imagining him with longer, curly, sandy-colored hair, light eyebrows, and a sunburn.”
Now slightly alarmed and wondering why, Roger frowned at the portrait of a man with slicked-back dark hair, level dark brows, and small eyes that gave away nothing.
“He certainly hasn’t got much expression …”
“Think bad plastic surgery,” she suggested, and there was a split second of incomprehension before it hit him. His mouth opened, and his throat closed, hard, and for an instant he was hanging, falling through a foot of air and ending with a heart-stopping jerk.
“Jesus,” he croaked, when his throat finally let go its death grip. “A time traveler? You really think so?”
“I know so,” she said flatly. “Do you remember, when we lived at Lallybroch, a guy named Michael Callahan—he went by ‘Mike’—who was an archaeologist who worked on Orkney? He came to look at the Iron Age fort on the hill above the—our—graveyard.” He saw her throat swell as she swallowed, hard. “Maybe he wasn’t looking at the fort. Maybe he was looking at the graves—and us.”
He looked from her tight lips to the drawing, back again.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” he said carefully. “But—”
“But I saw him again,” she said, and he saw that she was clutching the fabric of her skirt, bunched in both hands. “At the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.”
A surge of searing-hot vomit hit the back of his throat, and he forced it down. She saw his face and let go the bunched fabric to take his hand in both hers, holding hard.
“I wouldn’t have thought of it at all—but looking at the ears, and suddenly it just came to me that the only thing I could think of that would make someone’s ears be like that would be if they’d had some kind of surgery that didn’t quite come out the way it was supposed to … and the way his face is so blank—and just all of a sudden I remembered that night. He—he tried to get into the van where the kids and I—I grabbed the woolly hat off his head, and yanked out some of his hair with it, and I caught just a glimpse of his face—and then I didn’t think about it again, because we were trying to get away and then I got the kids to California, and … But just now.” She swallowed again, and he saw that the paleness of her face had given way to a flush of rage. “It’s him. I know it’s him.”