“Oh, yes. That is, I mean to say, oh, no. No, indeed. The Mohawk and the Tuscarora both, their women choose who they bed with, even who they marry. No such thing as rape among ’em. Oh, no. No, sir; she won’t be misused, I can promise that.”
“Well, and I’m glad to hear it.” Jamie sat back, at ease, and gave me an I-trust-you’re-satisfied glare out of the corner of his eye. I smiled demurely.
Ian might be not quite sixteen, but he was far too observant to have missed all these exchanges. He coughed, in a meaningful Scottish manner.
“Uncle, Mr. Myers has been kind enough to invite me to go with him and Mrs. Polly, to see the Indian village. I shall be sure to see that she finds good treatment there.”
“You—” Jamie started, then broke off. He gave his nephew a long, hard look across the fire. I could see the thoughts racing through his mind.
Ian hadn’t asked permission to go; he’d announced he was going. If Jamie forbade him, he must give grounds—and he could scarcely say that it was too dangerous, as this would mean admitting both that he was willing to send the slave woman into danger and that he didn’t trust Myers and his relations with the local Indians. Jamie was trapped, and very neatly too.
He breathed in strongly through his nose. Ian grinned.
I looked back across the fire. Pollyanne was still sitting as she had been, not moving. Her eyes were still fixed on Myers, but a slight smile curved her lips in invitation. One hand rose slowly, cupping a massive breast, almost absently.
Myers was staring back, dazed as a deer with a hunter’s light in its eyes.
And would I do differently? I thought later, listening to the discreet rustling noises and small groans from the direction of Myers’s blankets. If I knew that my life depended on a man? Would I not do anything I could to ensure he would protect me, in the face of unknown danger?
There was a snapping and crackling in the bushes, not far away. It was loud, and I stiffened. So did Jamie. He slid his hand out from under my shirt, reaching for his dirk, then relaxing, as the reassuring scent of skunk reached our nostrils.
He put his hand back under my shirt, squeezed my breast and fell back asleep, his breath warm on my neck.
No great difference at all, perhaps. Was my future any more certain than hers? And did I not depend for my life upon a man bound to me—at least in part—by desire of my body?
A faint wind breathed through the trees, and I hitched the blanket higher on my shoulder. The fire had burned to embers, and so high in the mountains, it was cool at night. The moon had set, but it was very clear; the stars blazed close, a net of light cast over the mountains’ peaks.
No, there were differences. However unknown my future, it would be shared, and the bond between my man and me went much deeper than the flesh. Beyond all this was the one great difference, though—I had chosen to be there.
15
NOBLE SAVAGES
We took our leave of the others in the morning, Jamie and Myers taking pains over the arrangement for a rendezvous in ten days time. Looking around me at the bewildering immensity of forest and mountain, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be sure of finding a specific place again; I could only trust in Jamie’s sense of navigation.
They turned to the north, we to the southwest, making our way along the course of the stream we had camped by. It seemed very quiet at first, and strangely lonely, with only the two of us. Within a short time, though, I had grown accustomed to the solitude and began to relax, taking a keen interest in our surroundings. This might, after all, be our home.
The thought was a rather daunting one; it was a place of amazing beauty and richness, but so wild, it hardly seemed that people could live in it. I didn’t voice this thought, however; only followed Jamie’s horse as he led us deeper and deeper into the mountains, stopping finally in the late afternoon to make a small camp and catch fish for dinner.
The light faded slowly, retreating through the trees. The thick mossy trunks grew dense with shadow, edges still rimmed with a fugitive light that hid among the leaves, green shadows shifting with the sunset breeze.
A tiny glow lit suddenly in the grass a few feet away, cool and bright. I saw another, and another, and then the edge of the wood was full of them, lazily falling, then blinking out, cold sparks drifting in the growing dark.
“You know, I never saw fireflies until I came to live in Boston,” I said, filled with pleasure at sight of them, glowing emerald and topaz in the grass. “They don’t have fireflies in Scotland, do they?”
Jamie shook his head, reclining lazily on the grass, one arm hooked behind his head.
“Bonny wee things,” he observed, and sighed with content. “This is my favorite time of the day, I think. When I lived in the cave, after Culloden, I would come out near evening, and sit on a stone, waiting for the dark.”
His eyes were half closed, watching the fireflies. The shadows faded upward as night rose from the earth to the sky. A moment before, light through the oak leaves had mottled him like a fawn; now the brightness had faded, so he lay in a sort of dim green glow, the lines of his body at once solid and insubstantial.
“All the wee bugs come out just now—the moths and the midges; all the bittie things that hang about in clouds over the water. Ye see the swallows come for them, and then the bats, swooping down. And the salmon, rising to the evening hatch and making rings on the water.”
His eyes were open now, fixed on the waving sea of grass on the hillside, but I knew he saw instead the surface of the tiny loch near Lallybroch, alive with fleeting ripples.
“It’s only a moment, but ye feel as though it will last forever. Strange, is it no?” he said thoughtfully. “Ye can almost see the light go as ye watch—and yet there’s no time ye can look and say ‘Now! Now it’s night.’ ” He gestured at the opening between the oak trees, and the valley below, its hollows filling with dark.
“No.” I lay back in the grass beside him, feeling the warm damp of the grass mold the buckskin to my body. The air was thick and cool under the trees, like the air in a church, dim and fragrant with remembered incense.
“Do you remember Father Anselm at the abbey?” I looked up; the color was going from the oak leaves overhead, leaving the soft silver undersides gray as mouse fur. “He said there was always an hour in the day when time seems to stop—but that it was different for everyone. He thought it might be the hour when one was born.”
I turned my head to look at him.
“Do you know when you were born?” I asked. “The time of day, I mean?”
He glanced at me and smiled, rolling over to face me.
“Aye, I do. Perhaps he was right, then, for I was born at suppertime—just at twilight on the first of May.” He brushed away a floating firefly and grinned at me.
“Have I never told ye that story? How my mother had put on a pot of brose to cook, and then her pains came on so fast she’d no time to think of it, and no one else remembered either until they smelled the burning, and it ruined the supper and the pot as well? There was nothing else in the house to eat save a great gooseberry pie. So they all ate that, but there was a new kitchenmaid and the gooseberries were green, and all of them—except my mother and me, of course—spent the night writhing wi’ the indigestion.”