“Hush,” he whispered, half rocking her. “It’s all right; there’s another way. We’ll get back; I know how. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you.”
Finally, she wore herself out, and lay still in the crook of his arm, sniffling and hiccuping. There was a large wet spot on the front of his shirt. The crickets in the tree, startled into silence by the uproar, cautiously resumed their songs overhead.
She freed herself and sat up, fumbling in the dark.
“I have to blow my dose,” she said thickly. “Do you have a hadky?”
He gave her the damp rag he used to tie back his hair. She made whooshing noises, and he smiled in the dark.
“You sound like a can of shaving cream.”
“And when was the last time you saw one of those?” She lay down on him again, head tucked into the curve of his shoulder, and reached up to touch his jaw. He’d shaved two days ago; there had been neither time nor opportunity since.
Her hair still smelled faintly of grass, though no longer of artificial flowers. It must be her natural scent.
She sighed deeply, tightened her arm around him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want you to come after me. But…Roger, I’m awfully glad you’re here!”
He kissed her temple; she was damp and salty with sweat and tears.
“So am I,” he said, and for the moment all the trials and dangers of the past two months seemed insignificant. All but one.
“How long have you been planning this?” he asked. He thought he could have told her, to the day. Since her letters had begun to change.
“Oh…about six months,” she said, confirming his guess. “It was when I went to Jamaica during last Easter vacation.”
“Aye?” To Jamaica, instead of to Scotland. She’d asked him to join her, and he’d refused, foolishly hurt that she hadn’t planned to come to him automatically.
She took a deep breath and let it out, blotting the neck of her shirt against her skin.
“I kept dreaming,” she said. “About my father. Fathers. Both of them.”
The dreams were little more than fragments; vivid glimpses of Frank Randall’s face, longer stretches now and then, in which she saw her mother. And now and then a tall, red-haired man whom she knew to be the father she had never seen.
“There was one dream in particular…” It had been night in the dream, somewhere tropical, with fields of tall green plants that might have been sugarcane, and fires burning in the distance.
“There were drums beating, and I knew something was hiding, waiting in the canes; something horrible,” she said. “My mother was there, drinking tea with a crocodile.” Roger grunted, and her voice grew sharper. “It was a dream, all right?
“Then he stepped out of the canes. I couldn’t see his face very well, because it was dark, but I could see that he had red hair; there were copper glints when he turned his head.”
“Was he the dreadful thing in the canes?” Roger asked.
“No.” He could hear the susurrus of her hair as she shook her head. It had gone quite dark by now, and she was little more than a comforting weight on his chest, a soft voice beside him, speaking from the shadows.
“He was standing between my mother and the awful thing. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there, waiting.” She gave a small, involuntary shudder and Roger tightened his hold on her.
“Then I knew my mother was going to stand up and walk right toward it. I tried to stop her, but I couldn’t make her hear me or see me. So I turned to him, and I called to him to go with her—to save her from whatever it was. And he saw me!” The hand on his arm squeezed tight. “He did, he saw me, and he heard me. And then I woke up.”
“Aye?” Roger said skeptically. “And this made you go to Jamaica, and—”
“It made me think,” she said sharply. “You’d looked; you couldn’t find them anywhere in Scotland after 1766, and you couldn’t find them on any of the emigration rolls to the Colonies. That was when you said you thought we should give up; that there wasn’t any more we could find out.”
Roger was glad of the darkness that hid his guilt. He kissed the top of her head, quickly.
“But I wondered; the place I saw them in the dream was in the tropics. What if they were in the Indies?”
“I looked,” Roger said. “I checked the passenger rolls of every ship that left Edinburgh or London in the late 1760s and ’70s—headed for anyplace. I did tell you,” he added, an edge in his voice.
“I know that,” she said, with a matching edge. “But what if they weren’t passengers? Why did people go to the Indies then— now, I mean?” She caught herself, voice cracking a little in realization.
“For trade, mostly.”
“Right. So what if they went on a cargo ship? They wouldn’t show up on the passenger rolls.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “Right, they wouldn’t. But then how would you look for them?”
“Warehouse registers, plantation account books, port manifests. I spent the whole vacation in libraries and museums. And—and I found them,” she said, with a small catch in her voice.
Christ, she’d seen the notice.
“Aye?” he said, striving for calmness.
She laughed, a little tremulously.
“A Captain James Fraser, of a ship named Artemis, sold five tons of bat guano to a planter in Montego Bay on April 2, 1767.”
Roger couldn’t help a grunt of amusement, but at the same time, couldn’t help objecting.
“Aye, but a ship’s captain? After all your mother said about the man’s seasickness? And not to be discouraging, but there must be literally hundreds of James Frasers; how could you possibly know—”
“There might; but on April the first, a woman named Claire Fraser bought a slave from the slave market in Kingston.”
“She what?”
“I don’t know why,” Brianna said firmly, “but I’m sure she had a good reason.”
“Well, sure, but—”
“The papers gave the slave’s name as ‘Temeraire,’ and described him as having one arm. Makes him stand out, doesn’t it? Anyway, I started looking through collections of old newspapers; not just from the Indies, from all the southern colonies, looking for that name—my mother wouldn’t keep a slave; if she bought him, she’d free him somehow, and the notices of manumission were sometimes printed in the local papers. I thought I could maybe find where the slave was freed.”
“And did you?”
“No.” She was quiet for a minute. “I—I found something else. A notice of their…deaths. My parents.”
Even knowing that she must have found it, to hear it from her lips was still a shock. He pulled her tight against him, wrapping his arms around her.
“Where?” he said softly. “How?”
He should have known better. He wasn’t listening to her half-choked explanation; he was too busy cursing himself. He should have known she was too stubborn to be dissuaded. All he’d done with his fatheaded interference was to drive her into secrecy. And it had been he who’d paid for that—in months of worry.