An Echo in the Bone (153 page)

“You are going to marry me,” he said, a fierce edge in his voice. “Are you aware that you are about to be arrested as a spy?”

“I—no.” I sat down again, as abruptly as I’d stood up. “What… why?”

“You would know that better than I would,” he said coldly.

In fact, I would. I repressed the sudden flutter of panic that threatened to overwhelm me, thinking of the papers I had conveyed secretly from one pair of hands to another in the cover of my basket, feeding the secret network of the Sons of Liberty.

“Even if that were true,” I said, struggling to keep my own voice level, “why the bloody hell would I marry you? Let alone why you would want to marry
me
, which I don’t believe for an instant.”

“Believe it,” he advised me briefly. “I will do it because it is the last service I can render Jamie Fraser. I can protect you; as my wife, no one can touch you. And
you
will do it because…” He cast a bleak glance behind me, raising his chin, and I looked around to see all four of Fergus’s children huddled in the doorway, the girls and Henri-Christian watching me with huge, round eyes. Germain was looking straight at Lord John, fear and defiance plain on his long, handsome face.

“Them, too?” I asked, taking a deep breath and turning to meet his gaze. “You can protect them, too?”

“Yes.”

“I—yes. All right.” I rested both hands flat on the counter, as though that somehow could keep me from spinning off into space. “When?”

“Now,” he said, and took my elbow. “There is no time to lose.”

I HAD NO MEMORY whatever of the brief ceremony, conducted in the parlor of Lord John’s house. The only memory I retained of the entire day was the sight of William, standing soberly beside his father—his stepfather—as best man. Tall, straight, long-nosed, his slanted cat-eyes resting on me with uncertain compassion.

He can’t be dead
, I remembered thinking, with unusual lucidity.
There he is
.

I said what I was told to say and then was escorted upstairs to lie down. I fell asleep at once and didn’t wake until the next afternoon.

Unfortunately, it was still real when I did.

DOROTHEA WAS THERE, hovering near me with concern. She stayed with me through the day, trying to coax me to eat something, offering me sips of whisky and brandy. Her presence was not exactly a comfort—nothing could be that—but she was at least an innocuous distraction, and I let her talk, the words washing over me like the sound of rushing water.

Toward evening, the men came back—Lord John and Willie. I heard them downstairs. Dottie went down and I heard her talking to them, a slight rise of interest in her voice, and then her steps on the stairs, quick and light.

“Aunt,” she said, breathless. “Are you well enough to come down, do you think?”

“I—yes, I suppose so.” Slightly taken aback at being called “Aunt,” I rose and made vague tidying motions. She took the brush from my hand, twisted up my hair, and, whipping out a ribboned cap, tucked my hair tenderly under it. I let her, and let her convey me gently downstairs, where I found Lord John and William in the parlor, both of them a little flushed.

“Mother Claire.” Willie took my hand and gently kissed it. “Come and look. Papa has found something he thinks you will like. Come and see it,” he repeated, drawing me gently toward the table.

“It” was a large wooden chest, made of some expensive wood, banded in gold. I blinked at it and put out a hand to touch it. It looked rather like a cutlery safe but much bigger.

“What… ?” I looked up to find Lord John standing beside me, looking somewhat abashed.

“A, um, present,” he said, deprived for once of his smooth manners. “I thought—I mean, I perceived that you lacked somewhat in the way of… equipment. I do not wish you to abandon your profession,” he added gently.

“My profession.” A chill was beginning to spread up my spine, along the edges of my jaw.

Fumbling a little, I tried to raise the lid of the chest, but my fingers were sweating; they slipped, leaving a slick of moisture gleaming on the wood.

“No, no, this way.” Lord John bent to show me, turning the chest toward himself. He slipped the hidden catch, lifted the lid, and swung the hinged doors open, then stood back with something of the air of a conjurer.

My scalp prickled with cold sweat, and black spots began to flicker at the corners of my eyes.

Two dozen empty gold-topped bottles. Two shallow drawers below. And above, gleaming in its velvet bed, the pieces of a brass-bound microscope. A medical chest.

My knees gave way and I fainted, welcoming the cool wood of the floor against my cheek.

THE PATHS OF DEATH

LYING IN THE TANGLED HELL of my bed at night, I searched for the way to death. I longed with every fiber of my being to pass from this present existence. Whether what lay on the other side of life was undreamed glory or only merciful oblivion, mystery was infinitely preferable to my present inescapable misery.

I cannot say what it was that kept me from a simple and violent escape. The means, after all, were always to hand. I had my choice of pistol ball or blade, of poisons ranging from swiftness to stupor.

I rummaged through the jars and bottles of the medicine chest like a madwoman, leaving the little drawers ajar, the doors hanging open, seeking, scrabbling in my haste, ransacking knowledge and memory as I did the chest, knocking jars and bottles and bits of the past to the floor in a jumble.

At last I thought I had them all and, with a shaking hand, laid them one by one by one on the tabletop before me.

Aconite. Arsenic …

So many kinds of death to choose from. How, then?

The ether. That would be the easiest, if not quite the surest. Lie down, soak a thick pad of cloth in the stuff, put the mask over my nose and mouth, and drift painlessly away. But there was always the chance that someone would find me. Or that, losing consciousness, my head might fall to one side or I’d suffer convulsions that would dislodge the rag, and I would simply wake again to this aching void of existence.

I sat still for a moment, and then, feeling dreamlike, reached out to pick up the knife that lay on the table, where I had carelessly left it after using it to cut flax stems. The knife Jamie had given me. It was sharp; the edge gleamed raw and silver.

It would be sure, and it would be fast.

JAMIE FRASER STOOD on the deck of the
Philomene
, watching the water slide endlessly away, thinking about death. He had at least stopped thinking about it in a personal manner, since the seasickness had—at long, long last—abated. His thoughts now were more abstract.

To Claire, he thought, death was always the Enemy. Something always to be fought, never yielded to. He was as well acquainted with death as she was but had perforce made his peace with it. Or thought he had. Like forgiveness, it was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of constant practice—to accept the notion of one’s own mortality, and yet live fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates. And that worthy Athenian had embraced exactly that paradox, he reflected, with the ghost of a smile.

He’d come face-to-face with death often enough—and remembered those encounters with sufficient vividness—to realize that there were indeed worse things. Much better to die than be left to mourn.

He had still a dreadful feeling of something worse than sorrow when he looked at his sister, small and solitary, and heard the word “widow” in his mind. It was wrong. She could not be that, couldn’t be severed in that brutal way. It was like watching her be cut in pieces, and he helpless to do anything.

He turned from that thought to his memories of Claire, his longing for her, the flame of her his candle in the dark. Her touch a comfort and a warmth beyond that of the body. He remembered the last evening before she’d left, holding hands on the bench outside the broch, feeling her heartbeat in her fingers, his own steadying to that warm, quick pulse.

Odd how the presence of death seemed to bring with it so many attendants, shades long-forgotten, glimpsed briefly in the gathering shadow. The thought of Claire, and how he had sworn to protect her from the first time he held her, brought back to him the nameless girl.

She’d died in France, on the far side of the void in his head that had been made by the blow of an ax. He hadn’t thought of her in years, but suddenly she was there again. She’d been in his mind when he’d held Claire at Leoch, and he’d felt that his marriage might be some small atonement.

He’d learned—slowly—to forgive himself for what had not been his fault and, in loving Claire, gave the girl’s shade some peace, he hoped.

He had felt obscurely that he owed God a life and had paid that debt by taking Claire to wife—though God knew he would have taken her in any case, he thought, and smiled wryly. But he’d kept faith with the promise to protect her.
The protection of my name, my clan—and the
protection of my body
, he’d said.

The protection of my body
. There was an irony in that that made him squirm, as he glimpsed another face among the shades. Narrow, mocking, long-eyed—so young.

Geneva
. One more young woman dead as the result of his lust. Not his fault, precisely—he’d fought that through, in the long days and nights following her death, alone in his cold bed above the stables, taking what comfort he could in the solid, voiceless presence of the horses shifting and champing in their stalls below. But had he not lain with her, she would not have died; that was inescapable.

Did he owe God another life? he wondered. He had thought it was Willie, the life he’d been given to protect with his own, in exchange for Geneva’s. But that trust had had to be handed to another.

Well, he had his sister now and assured Ian silently that he would keep her safe.
As long as I live
, he thought. And that should be some time yet. He thought he’d used only five of the deaths the fortune-teller in Paris had promised him.

“You’ll die nine times before you rest in your grave,”
she’d said. Did it take so many tries to get it right? he wondered.

I LET MY HAND fall back, exposing my wrist, and placed the tip of the knife midway up my forearm. I’d seen many unsuccessful suicides, those who slashed their wrists from side to side, the wounds small mouths that cried for help. I’d seen those who meant it. The proper way was to slit the veins lengthwise, deep, sure cuts that would drain me of blood in minutes, assure unconsciousness in seconds.

The mark was still visible on the mound at the base of my thumb. A faint white “J,” the mark he’d left on me on the eve of Culloden, when we first faced the stark knowledge of death and separation.

I traced the thin white line with the tip of the knife and felt the seductive whisper of metal on my skin. I’d wanted to die with him then, and he had sent me on with a firm hand. I carried his child; I could not die.

I carried her no longer—but she was still there. Perhaps reachable. I sat motionless for what seemed a long time, then sighed and put the knife back on the table carefully.

Perhaps it was the habit of years, a bent of mind that held life sacred for its own sake, or a superstitious awe of extinguishing a spark kindled by a hand not my own. Perhaps it was obligation. There were those who needed me—or at least to whom I could be useful. Perhaps it was the stubbornness of the body, with its inexorable insistence on never-ending process.

I could slow my heart, slow enough to count the beats… slow the flowing of my blood ’til my heart echoed in my ears with the doom of distant drums.

There were pathways in the dark. I knew; I had seen people die. Despite physical decay, there was no dying until the pathway was found. I couldn’t—yet—find mine.

NUMBNESS

THE NEW MEDICAL CHEST sat on the table in my room, gleaming softly in the candlelight. Beside it were the gauze bags of dried herbs I had bought during the morning, the fresh bottles of the tinctures I had brewed in the afternoon, much to Mrs. Figg’s displeasure at having her kitchen’s purity so perverted. Her slitted eyes said that she knew me for a rebel and thought me likely a witch; she’d retreated to the doorway of the cookhouse while I worked but wouldn’t leave altogether, instead keeping silent suspicious watch over me and my cauldron.

A large decanter of plum brandy was keeping me company. Over the course of the last week, I had found that a glass of it at night would let me find surcease in sleep, at least for a little. It wasn’t working tonight. I heard the clock on the mantelpiece downstairs chime softly, once.

I stooped to pick up a box of dried chamomile that had spilled, sweeping the scattered leaves carefully back into their container. A bottle of syrup of poppies had fallen over, too, lying on its side, the aromatic liquid oozing round the cork. I set it upright, wiped the golden droplets from its neck with my kerchief, blotted up the tiny puddle from the floor. A root, a stone, a leaf. One by one, I picked them up, set them straight, put them away, the accoutrements of my calling, the pieces of my destiny.

The cool glass seemed somehow remote, the gleaming wood an illusion. Heart beating slowly, erratically, I put a hand flat on the box, trying to steady myself, to fix myself in space and time.

It was becoming more difficult by the day.

I remembered, with sudden, painful vividness, a day on the retreat from Ticonderoga. We had reached a village, found momentary refuge in a barn. I’d worked all day then, doing what could be done with no supplies, no medicines, no instruments, no bandages save what I made from the sweat-sodden, filthy clothes of the wounded. Feeling the world recede further and further as I worked, hearing my voice as though it belonged to someone else. Seeing the bodies under my hands, only bodies. Limbs. Wounds. Losing touch.

Darkness fell. Someone came, pulled me to my feet, and sent me out of the barn, into the little tavern. It was crowded, overwhelmed with people. Someone—Ian?—said that Jamie had food for me outside.

He was alone there, in the empty woodshed, dimly lit by a distant lantern.

I’d stood in the doorway, swaying. Or perhaps it was the room that swayed.