“Make it go away?”
He took a deep breath, and his fists flexed briefly, then relaxed.
“No. Forgiveness doesna make things go away. Ye ken that as well as I do.” He turned his head to look at me, in curiosity. “Don’t ye?”
There were no more than a few inches between us, but the aching distance between our hearts reached miles. Jamie was silent for a long time. I could hear my heart, beating in my ears …
“Listen,” he said at last.
“I’m listening.” He looked sideways at me, and the ghost of a smile touched his mouth. He held out a broad, pitch-stained palm to me.
“Give me your hands while ye do it, aye?”
“Why?” But I put my hands into his without hesitation, and felt his grip close on them. His fingers were cold, and I could see the hairs on his forearm ruffled with chill where he’d rolled up his sleeves to help Fanny with the gun.
“What hurts you cleaves my heart,” he said softly. “Ye ken that, aye?”
“I do,” I said, just as softly. “And you know it’s true for me, too. But—” I swallowed and bit my lip. “It—it seems …”
“Claire,” he interrupted, and looked at me straight. “Are ye relieved that he’s dead?”
“Well … yes,” I said unhappily. “I don’t want to feel that way, though; it doesn’t seem right. I mean—” I struggled to find some clear way to put it. “On the one hand—what he did to me wasn’t … mortal. I hated it, but it didn’t physically hurt me; he wasn’t trying to hurt me or kill me. He just …”
“Ye mean, if it had been Harley Boble ye met at Beardsley’s, ye wouldna have minded my killing him in cold blood?” he interrupted, with a tinge of irony.
“I would have shot him myself, on sight.” I blew out a long, deep breath. “But that’s the other thing. There’s what he—the man—do you know his name, by the way?”
“Yes, and you’re not going to, so dinna ask me,” he said tersely.
I gave him a narrow look, and he gave it right back. I flapped my hand, dismissing it for the moment.
“The other thing,” I repeated firmly, “is that if I’d shot Boble myself—you wouldn’t have had to. I wouldn’t feel that you were … damaged by it.”
His face went blank for a moment, then his gaze sharpened again.
“Ye think it damaged me to kill the man who took ye?”
I reached for his hand and held it.
“I bloody know it did,” I said quietly. And added in a whisper, looking down at the scarred, powerful hand in mine, “What hurts you cleaves my heart, Jamie.”
His fingers curled tight over mine. He sat with his head bent for a long moment, then lifted my hand and kissed it gently.
“It’s all right, mo chridhe,” he said. “Dinna fash. There’s another side to it. And one that’s nothing to do with you.”
“What’s that?” I asked, surprised. He squeezed my hand briefly and let it go, sitting back to look at me.
“I couldna let him live,” he said simply. “Whether he’d forced ye or no. Ye were there when Ian asked me what to do. I said, ‘Kill them all.’ Ye heard me, aye?”
“I did.” My throat was suddenly tight, and there was a band of iron around my chest, the taste of blood clotting my mouth and the fear of suffocation a blackness in my mind. The sense of that night seeped through me like cold smoke.
“I might have done that in rage—I did do it in a black rage—but I would have done the same was my blood as cold as ice.” He touched my face, smoothing back an escaped curl. “Do ye not see? Those men were brigands, and worse. To leave one of them alive would be to leave the root of a poisonous plant in the ground, to grow again.”
It was a vivid image—but so was my memory of that large, shambling man, wandering vaguely among the pigpens at Beardsley’s trading post where I’d seen him, afterward. Seeming so unlike the man who’d come out of the darkness, to smother me with the weight of his body …
“But he seemed so … feckless,” I said, with a helpless gesture. “How could someone like that even begin to assemble a—a gang?”
He stood up suddenly, unable to sit any longer, and paced restlessly to and fro in front of me.
“D’ye not see, Sassenach? Even was he a feckless dolt—he went places. Ye saw him talk wi’ the folk at Beardsley’s, no?”
“Yes,” I said slowly, “but—”
He stopped, glaring down at me.
“And what if he began to talk, one day, about how he’d ridden wi’ Hodgepile and the Browns, the things they’d done? What if he lost himself in drink, and boasted of how he’d—” He choked that off and took a deep breath. “About what he’d done to you.”
I felt as though I’d swallowed something cold and slimy. And still faintly alive. Jamie’s mouth compressed, looking at my face.
“I’m sorry, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “But it’s true. And I wouldna let that happen. Because of you. Because of me. But more … because if it was known that such a thing had happened—”
“It was known,” I said, my lips stiff. “It is known.” None of the men who had rescued me that night could have been in much doubt that I’d been raped, whether they knew which man—men—had done the act, or not. If they knew, their wives knew. No one had ever spoken to me of it, nor ever would, but the knowledge was there, and no way ever to make it go away.
“Because if it was known that such a thing had happened,” he repeated evenly, “and that any man who took part in it had been allowed to live … then anyone who lives under my protection would feel themselves helpless. And rightly so.”
He exhaled strongly through his nose, turning away.
“D’ye no remember that man—the one who called himself Wendigo?”
“Jesus.” Gooseflesh rippled over my shoulders and down my arms. I had forgotten. Not the man himself—he was a time traveler named Wendigo Donner—but his connection with the man we were discussing.
A member of Hodgepile’s gang, Donner had escaped into the darkness when Jamie and his men had rescued me—and months later had come back to the Ridge, with companions, to rob and kill, in search of the gemstones he knew we had. It was his attack on the Big House that had—indirectly—caused the conflagration that burned it to the ground, and his ashes were still mingled with the remains of our lives in that clearing.
Jamie was right. Donner had escaped and come back to try to kill us. To leave the lumpkin who’d raped me at large was to risk the same thing happening again. The realization of it sickened me. I had managed to put most of what had happened aside, dealing with the physical aspects as necessary, firmly quashing or refusing to remember the rest. But it was still there—all of it, turning like an evil prism to show things in a harsh new light. The light, I now realized, that Jamie always saw by.
And seeing now clearly myself, I clenched my belly muscles and forced my voice to be steady.
“What if he wasn’t the last of them?”