“They may be allies, Auntie, but it doesna mean Nacognaweto and his braves trust them. Even the other Nations of the Iroquois League are afraid of the Mohawk—Christian or no.”
* * *
It was near sunset when we came in sight of the cabin. I was cold and tired, but my heart lifted inexpressibly at the sight of the tiny homestead. One of the mules in the penfold, a light gray creature named Clarence, saw us and brayed enthusiastically in welcome, making the rest of the horses crowd up next to the rails, eager for food.
“The horses look fine.” Jamie, with a stockman’s eye, looked first to the animals’ welfare. I was rather more concerned with our own; getting inside, getting warm, and getting fed, as soon as possible.
We invited Ian’s friends to stay, but they declined, unloading Jamie in the dooryard and vanishing quickly to resume their vigilance over the departing Mohawk.
“They dinna like to stay in a white person’s house, Auntie,” Ian explained. “They think we smell bad.”
“Oh, really?” I said in pique, thinking of a certain elderly gentleman I had met in Anna Ooka, who appeared to have smeared himself with bear grease and then had himself sewn into his clothes for the winter. The pot calling the kettle black, if you asked me.
* * *
Much later, Christmas properly kept with a dram—or two—of whisky all round, we lay at last in our own bed, watching the flames of the newly kindled fire, and listening to Ian’s peaceful snores.
“It’s good to be home again,” I said softly.
“It is.” Jamie sighed and pulled me closer, my head tucked into the curve of his shoulder. “I did have the strangest dreams, sleeping in the cold.”
“You did?” I stretched, luxuriating in the soft yielding of the feather-stuffed mattress. “What did you dream about?”
“All kinds of things.” He sounded a bit shy. “I dreamt of Brianna, now and again.”
“Really?” That was a little startling; I too had dreamt of Brianna in our icy shelter—something I seldom did.
“I did wonder…” Jamie hesitated for a moment. “Has she a birthmark, Sassenach? And if so, did ye tell me of it?”
“She does,” I said slowly, thinking. “I don’t think I ever told you about it, though; it isn’t visible most of the time, so it’s been years since I noticed it, myself. It’s a—”
His hand tightening on my shoulder stopped me.
“It’s a wee brown mark, shaped like a diamond,” he said. “Just behind her left ear. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” It was warm and cozy in bed, but a small coolness on the back of my neck made me shiver suddenly. “Did you see that in your dream?”
“I kissed her there,” he said softly.
22
SPARK OF AN ANCIENT FLAME
Oxford, September 1970
Oh, Jesus.” Roger stared at the page in front of him until the letters lost their meaning and became no more than curlicues. No such trick would erase the meaning of the words themselves; those were already carved into his mind.
“Oh, God, no!” he said out loud. The girl in the next carrel jerked in irritation at the noise, scraping the legs of her chair against the floor.
He leaned over the book, covering it with his forearms, eyes closed. He felt sick, and the palms of his hands were cold and sweaty.
He sat that way for several minutes, fighting the truth. It wasn’t going to go away, though. Christ, it had already happened, hadn’t it? A long time ago. And you couldn’t change the past.
Finally he swallowed the taste of bile in the back of his throat and looked again. It was still there. A small notice from a newspaper, printed on February 13, 1776, in the American Colony of North Carolina, in the town of Wilmington.
It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that destroyed their house in the settlement of Fraser’s Ridge, on the night of January 21 last. Mr. Fraser, a nephew of the late Hector Cameron of River Run plantation, was born at Broch Tuarach in Scotland. He was widely known in the colony and deeply respected; he leaves no surviving children.
Except that he did.
Roger grasped for a moment at the dim hope that it wasn’t them; there were, after all, any number of James Frasers, it was a fairly common name. But not James MacKenzie Fraser, not with a wife named Claire. Not born in Broch Tuarach, Scotland.
No, it was them; the sick certainty filled his chest and squeezed his throat with grief. His eyes stung and the ornate eighteenth-century typeface blurred again.
So she had found him, Claire. Found her gallant Highlander, and enjoyed at least a few years with him. He hoped they had been good years. He had liked Claire Randall very much—no, that was to damn her with faint praise. If he were truthful, he had loved her, and for her own sake as well as her daughter’s.
More than that. He had wanted badly for her to find her Jamie Fraser, to live happily ever after with him. The knowledge—or more accurately, the hope—that she had done so had been a small talisman to him; a witness that enduring love was possible, a love strong enough to withstand separation and hardship, strong enough to outlast time. And yet all flesh was mortal; no love could outlast that fact.
He gripped the edge of the table, trying to get himself under control. Foolish, he told himself. Thoroughly foolish. And yet he felt as bereft as he had when the Reverend had died; as though he were himself newly orphaned.
Realization came as a fresh blow. He couldn’t show this to Bree, he couldn’t. She’d known the risk, of course, but—no. She wouldn’t have imagined anything like this.
It was the purest chance that had led him to find it. He had been looking for the lyrics of old ballads to add to his repertoire, thumbing through a book of country songs. An illustration had shown the original newspaper page on which one ballad had first been published, and Roger, idly browsing, had glanced at the archaic notices posted on the same newspaper page, his eye caught by the name “Fraser.”
The shock was beginning to wear off a little, though grief had settled in the pit of his stomach, nagging as the pain of an ulcer. He was a scholar and the son of a scholar; he had grown up surrounded by books, imbued since childhood with the sanctity of the printed word. He felt like a murderer as he groped for his penknife and stealthily opened it, glancing around to be sure he was unobserved.
It was instinct more than reason; the instinct that leads a man to want to clear up the remains of an accident, to lay a decent covering over the bodies, to obliterate the visible traces of disaster, even though the tragedy itself remains.
With the folded page lying hidden in his pocket like a severed thumb, he left the library, to walk the rainy streets of Oxford.
The walking calmed him, made it possible to think rationally again, to force his own feelings back long enough to plan what he must do, how to protect Brianna from a grief that would be more profound and longer felt than his own.
He had checked the bibliographic information in the front of the book; published in 1906 by a small British press. It wouldn’t be widely available, then; but still something Brianna might stumble over in her own researches.