“Pregnant. My God, but how?”
Jamie made a derisive noise in the back of his throat. Roger glanced at him, then quickly away.
“That is, I never thought—”
“How? Aye, ye didna think, and it’s my daughter left to pay the price of your pleasure!”
Roger’s head snapped round at that, and he glared at Jamie.
“She is not left, in any way! I told you she is my wife!”
“She is?” I said, startled in the midst of my unwrapping.
“They’re handfast,” Jamie said, very grudgingly. “Why could the lass not have told us, though?”
I thought I could answer that one—in more than one way. The second answer wasn’t one I could suggest in front of Roger, though.
She hadn’t said, because she was with child, and thought it was Bonnet’s. Believing that, she might have thought it better not to reveal their handfasting, so as to leave Roger an escape—if he wanted it.
“Most likely because she thought you wouldn’t see that as a true marriage,” I said. “I’d told her about our wedding; about the contract and how you insisted on marrying me in church, with a priest. She wouldn’t want to tell you anything she thought you might not approve of—she wanted so badly to please you.”
Jamie had the grace to look abashed at this, but Roger ignored the argument.
“Is she well?” he asked, leaning forward and grasping my arm.
“Yes, she’s fine,” I assured him, hoping it was still true. “She wanted to come with us, but of course we couldn’t let her do that.”
“She wanted to come?” His face lighted up, joy and relief plain to see, even through the hair and filth. “Then she didn’t—” He stopped abruptly, and glanced from me to Jamie and back. “When I met…Mr. Fraser on the mountainside, he seemed to think that she—er—had said—”
“A terrible misunderstanding,” I put in hastily. “She hadn’t told us about the handfasting, so when she turned up pregnant, we, er…assumed…” Jamie was brooding, looking at Roger with no particular favor, but jerked into awareness when I nudged him sharply.
“Oh, aye,” he said, a little grudgingly. “A mistake. I’ve given Mr. Wakefield my apologies and told him I shall do my best to see it right. But we’ve other things to think of now. Have ye seen Ian, Sassenach?”
“No.” I became aware for the first time that Ian was not with them, and felt a small lurch of fear in the pit of my stomach. Jamie looked grim.
“Where have ye been all night, Sassenach?”
“I was with—oh, Jesus!”
I ignored his question for a moment, caught up in the sight of Roger’s foot. The flesh was swollen and reddened over half his foot, with a severe ulceration on the outer margin of the sole. I pressed firmly, a little way in, and felt the nasty give of small pockets of pus under the skin.
“What happened here?”
“I cut it, trying to get away. They bound it and put things on it, but it’s been infected on and off. It gets better, and then it gets worse.” He shrugged; his attention wasn’t on his foot, ugly as it was. He looked up at Jamie, evidently having come to a decision.
“Brianna didn’t send you to meet me, then? She didn’t ask you to—get rid of me?”
“No,” Jamie said, taken by surprise. He smiled briefly, his features suffused with sudden charm. “That was my own notion.”
Roger drew a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly.
“Thank God,” he said, and opened them. “I thought perhaps she’d—we’d had a terrible argument, just before I left her, and I thought maybe that was why she hadn’t told you about the handfasting; that she’d decided she didn’t want to be married to me.” There was sweat on his forehead, either from the news or from my handling of his foot. He smiled, a little painfully. “Having me beaten to death or sold into slavery seemed a trifle extreme, though, even for a woman with her temper.”
“Mmphm.” Jamie was slightly flushed. “I did say I was sorry for it.”
“I know.” Roger looked at him for a minute, evidently making up his mind about something. He took a deep breath, then bent down and put my hand gently away from his foot. He straightened up and met Jamie’s eyes, dead-on.
“I’ve something to tell you. What we fought over. Has she told you what brought her here—to find you?”
“The death notice? Aye, she’s told us. Ye dinna think I’d allow Claire to come with me otherwise?”
“What?” Puzzled wariness showed in Roger’s eyes.
“Ye canna have it both ways. If she and I are to die at Fraser’s Ridge six years from now, we canna very well be killed by the Iroquois any time before that, now can we?”
I stared at him; that particular implication had escaped me. Rather staggering; practical immortality—for a time. But that was assuming—
“That’s assuming that you can’t change the past—that we can’t, I mean. Do you believe that?” Roger leaned forward a little, intent.
“I will be damned if I know. Do you think so?”
“Yes,” Roger said flatly. “I do think the past can’t be changed. That’s why I did it.”
“Did what?”
He licked his lips, but went doggedly on.
“I found that death notice long before Brianna did. I thought, though, that it would be useless to try to change things. So I—I kept it from her.” He looked from me to Jamie. “So now you know. I didn’t want her to come; I did everything I could to keep her away from you. I thought it was too dangerous. And—I was afraid of losing her,” he ended simply.
To my surprise, Jamie was looking at Roger with sudden approval.
“Ye tried to keep her safe, then? To protect her?”
Roger nodded, a certain relief lessening the tension in his shoulders.
“So you understand?”
“Aye, I do. That’s the first thing I’ve heard that gives me a good opinion of ye, sir.”
It wasn’t an opinion I shared at the moment.
“You found that thing—and didn’t tell her?” I could feel the blood climbing into my cheeks.
Roger saw the look on my face, and looked away.
“No. She…um…she saw it your way, I’m afraid. She thought—well, she said I’d betrayed her, and—”
“And you did! Her and us both! Of all the—Roger, how could you do such a thing?”
“He did right,” Jamie said. “After all—” I turned on him fiercely, interrupting.
“He did not! He deliberately kept it from her, and tried to keep her from—don’t you realize, if he’d succeeded, you’d never have seen her?”
“Aye, I do. And what’s happened to her would not have happened.” His eyes were deep blue, steady on mine. “I would it had been so.”
I swallowed down my grief and anger, until I thought I could speak again without choking.
“I don’t think she would have had it so,” I said softly. “And it was hers to say.”
Roger jumped in, before Jamie could reply.