The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (648 page)

His voice shook, very slightly, when he said, “take my son,” and I moved to him by instinct, wanting somehow to patch the open wound beneath those words.

He was stiff when I touched him, not wanting to be embraced—but he took my hand and squeezed it.

“Could you … really tell, do you think?” I was not shocked; John Grey had told me of that offer, years before, in Jamaica. I didn’t think he had realized the true nature of it, though.

Jamie’s hand tightened on mine, and his thumb traced the outline of mine, rubbing lightly over the nail. He looked down at me, and I felt his eyes search my face—not in question, but in the way one does when seeing anew some object grown familiar—seeing with the eyes what has been seen for a long time only with the heart.

His free hand rose and traced the line of my brows, two fingers resting for an instant on the bone of my cheek, then moved up, back, cool in the warmth of my hair.

“Ye canna be so close to another,” he said finally. “To be within each other, to smell their sweat, and rub the hairs of your body with theirs and see nothing of their soul. Or if ye
can
do that …” He hesitated, and I wondered whether he thought of Black Jack Randall, or of Laoghaire, the woman he had married, thinking me dead. “Well … that is a dreadful thing in itself,” he finished softly, and his hand dropped away.

There was silence between us. A sudden rustle came from the grass outside as Adso lunged and disappeared, and a mockingbird began to shriek alarm from the big red spruce. In the kitchen, something was dropped with a clang, and then the rhythmic
shoosh
of sweeping began. All the homely sounds of this life we had made.

Had I ever done that? Lain with a man, and seen nothing of his soul? Indeed I had, and he was right. A breath of coldness touched me, and the hairs rose, silent on my skin.

He heaved a sigh that seemed to come from his feet, and rubbed a hand over his bound hair.

“But he wouldna do it. John.” He looked up then, and gave me a crooked smile. “He loved me, he said. And if I couldna give him that in return—and he kent I couldn’t—then he’d not take counterfeit for true coin.”

He shook himself, hard, like a dog coming out of the water.

“No. A man who would say such a thing is not one who’d bugger a child for the sake of his father’s bonny blue eyes, I’ll tell ye that for certain, Sassenach.”

“No,” I said. “Tell me …” I hesitated, and he looked at me, one eyebrow up. “If—if he
had
 … er … taken you up on that offer—and you’d found him …” I fumbled for some reasonable wording. “Less, um, decent than you might hope—”

“I should have broken his neck there by the lake,” he said. “It wouldna have mattered if they’d hanged me; I’d not have let him have the boy.

“But he didn’t, and I did,” he added with a half-shrug. “And if wee Bobby goes to his Lordship’s bed, I think it will be of his own free will.”

No man is really at his best with someone else’s hand up his arse. I had noticed this before, and Robert Higgins was no exception to the general rule.

“Now, this won’t hurt much at all,” I said as soothingly as possible. “All you need to do is to keep quite still.”

“Oh, I s’all do that, mum, indeed I will,” he assured me fervently.

I had him on the surgery table, wearing only his shirt, and situated foursquare on hands and knees, which brought the area of operation conveniently to eye level. The forceps and ligatures I should need were placed on the small table to my right, with a bowl of fresh leeches alongside, in case of need.

He emitted a small shriek when I applied a wet cloth soaked in turpentine to the area, in order to cleanse it thoroughly, but was as good as his word and didn’t move.

“Now, we are going to obtain a very good effect here,” I assured him, taking up a pair of long-nosed forceps. “But if the relief is to be permanent, there will have to be a drastic change in your diet. Do you understand me?”

He gasped deeply, as I grasped one of the hemorrhoids and pulled it toward me. There were three, a classic presentation, at nine, two, and five o’clock. Bulbous as raspberries, and quite the same color.

“Oh! Y-yes, mum.”

“Oatmeal,” I said firmly, transferring the forceps to my other hand without lessening the grip, and taking up a needle threaded with silk thread in my right. “Porridge every morning, without fail. Have you noticed a change for the better in your bowel habits, since Mrs. Bug has been feeding you parritch for breakfast?”

I passed the thread loosely round the base of the hemorrhoid, then delicately pushed the needle up beneath the loop, making a small noose of it, and pulled tight.

“Ahhh … oh! Erm … tell ’ee truth, mum, it’s like shitting house bricks covered with hedgehog skin, makes no matter what I eat.”

“Well, it will,” I assured him, securing the ligature with a knot. I released the hemorrhoid, and he breathed deeply. “Now, grapes. You like grapes, don’t you?”

“No’m. Sets me teeth on edge to bite ’em.”

“Really?” His teeth didn’t look badly decayed; I should have a closer look at his mouth; he might be suffering from marginal scurvy. “Well, we’ll have Mrs. Bug make a nice raisin pie for you; you can eat that with no difficulty. Does Lord John have a capable cook?” I took aim with my forceps and got hold of the next one. Now accustomed to the sensation, he only grunted a bit.

“Yessum. Be an Indian, he is, named Manoke.”

“Hmm.” Round, up, tighten, tie off. “I’ll write out a receipt for the raisin pie, for you to carry back to him. Does he cook yams, or beans? Beans are quite good for the purpose.”

“I b’lieve he does, mum, but his Lordship—”

I had the windows open for ventilation—Bobby was no filthier than the average, but he was certainly no cleaner—and at this point, I heard sounds from the trailhead; voices, and the jingle of harness.

Bobby heard them, too, and glanced wildly at the window, hindquarters tensing as though to spring off the table like a grasshopper. I grasped him by one leg, but then thought better of it. There was no way of covering the window, bar closing the shutters, and I needed the light.

“Go ahead and stand up,” I told him, letting go and reaching for a towel. “I’ll go and see who it is.” He followed this direction with alacrity, scrambling down and reaching hastily for his breeches.

I stepped out onto the porch, in time to greet the two men who led their mules up over the last arduous slope and into the yard. Richard Brown, and his brother Lionel, from the eponymously named Brownsville.

I was surprised to see them; it was a good three-day ride to Brownsville from the Ridge, and there was little commerce between the two settlements. It was at least that far to Salem, in the opposite direction, but the inhabitants of the Ridge went there much more frequently; the Moravians were both industrious and great traders, taking honey, oil, salt fish, and hides in trade for cheese, pottery, chickens, and other small livestock. So far as I knew, the denizens of Brownsville dealt only in cheap trade goods for the Cherokee, and in the production of a very inferior type of beer, not worth the ride.

“Good day, mistress.” Richard, the smaller and elder of the brothers, touched the brim of his hat, but didn’t take it off. “Is your husband to home?”

“He’s out by the hay barn, scraping hides.” I wiped my hands carefully on the towel I was carrying. “Do come round to the kitchen; I’ll bring up some cider.”

“Don’t trouble.” Without further ado, he turned and set off purposefully round the house. Lionel Brown, a bit taller than his brother, though with the same spare, almost gangly build and the same tobacco-colored hair, nodded briefly to me as he followed.

They had left their mules, reins hanging, evidently for me to tend. The animals were beginning to amble slowly across the yard, pausing to crop the long grass that edged the path.

“Hmpf!” I said, glaring after the brothers Brown.

“Who are they?” said a low voice behind me. Bobby Higgins had come out and was peering off the corner of the porch with his good eye. Bobby tended to be wary of strangers—and no wonder, given his experiences in Boston.

“Neighbors, such as they are.” I lunged off the porch and caught one of the mules by the bridle as he reached for the peach sapling I had planted near the porch. Disliking this interference in his affairs, he brayed ear-splittingly in my face, and attempted to bite me.

“Here, mum, let me.” Bobby, already holding the other mule’s reins, leaned past to take the halter from me. “Hark at ’ee!” he said to the obstreperous mule. “Hush tha noise, else I take a stick to ’ee, then!”

Bobby had been a foot soldier rather than cavalry, it was clear to see. The words were bold enough, but ill-matched with his tentative manner. He gave a perfunctory yank on the mule’s reins. The mule promptly laid back its ears and bit him in the arm.

He screamed and let go both sets of reins. Clarence, my own mule, hearing the racket, set up a loud bray of greeting from his pen, and the two strange mules promptly trotted off in that direction, stirrup leathers bouncing.

Bobby wasn’t badly hurt, though the mule’s teeth had broken the skin; spots of blood seeped through the sleeve of his shirt. As I was turning back the cloth to have a look at it, I heard footsteps on the porch, and looked up to see Lizzie, a large wooden spoon in hand, looking alarmed.

“Bobby! What’s happened?”

He straightened at once, seeing her, assuming nonchalance, and brushed a lock of curly brown hair off his brow.

“Ah, oh! Naught, miss. Bit o’ trouble with tha sons o’ Belial, like. No fear, it’s fine.”

Whereupon his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell over in a dead faint.

“Oh!” Lizzie flew down the steps and knelt beside him, urgently patting his cheek. “Is he all right, Mrs. Fraser?”

“God knows,” I said frankly. “I think so, though.” Bobby appeared to be breathing normally, and I found a reasonable pulse in his wrist.

“Shall we carry him inside? Or should I fetch a burnt feather, do you think? Or the spirits of ammonia from the surgery? Or some brandy?” Lizzie hovered like an anxious bumblebee, ready to fly off in any of several different directions.

“No, I think he’s coming round.” Most faints last only a few seconds, and I could see his chest lift as his breathing deepened.

“Bit o’ brandy wouldn’t come amiss,” he murmured, eyelids beginning to flutter.

I nodded to Lizzie, who vanished back into the house, leaving her spoon behind on the grass.

“Feeling a bit peaky, are you?” I inquired sympathetically. The injury to his arm was no more than a scratch, and I certainly hadn’t done anything of a shocking nature to him—well, not physically shocking. What was the trouble here?

“I dunno, mum.” He was trying to sit up, and while he was white as a sheet, seemed otherwise all right, so I let him. “It’s only, every now and again, I gets these spots, like, whirring round me head like a swarm o’ bees, and then it all goes black.”

“Now and again? It’s happened before?” I asked sharply.

“Yessum.” His head wobbled like a sunflower in the breeze, and I put a hand under his armpit, lest he fall over again. “His Lordship was in hopes you might know summat would stop it.”

“His Lord—oh, he knew about the fainting?” Well, of course he would, if Bobby were in the habit of falling over in front of him.

He nodded, and took a deep, gasping breath.

“Doctor Potts bled me regular, twice a week, but it didn’t seem to help.”

“I daresay not. I hope he was of somewhat more help with your piles,” I remarked dryly.

A faint tinge of pink—he had scarcely enough blood to provide a decent blush, poor boy—rose in his cheeks, and he glanced away, fixing his gaze on the spoon.

“Erm … I, um, didn’t mention
that
to anybody.”

“You didn’t?” I was surprised at that. “But—”

“See, ’twas only the riding. From Virginia.” The pink tinge grew. “I’d not have let on, save I was in such agony after a week on yon bloody horse—saving your presence, mum—I’d no chance of hiding it.”

“So Lord John didn’t know about that, either?”

He shook his head vigorously, making the disheveled brown curls flop back over his forehead. I felt rather annoyed—with myself for having evidently misjudged John Grey’s motives, and with John Grey, for making me feel a fool.

“Well … are you feeling a bit better, now?” Lizzie was not appearing with the brandy, and I wondered momentarily where she was. Bobby was still very pale, but nodded gamely, and struggled to his feet, where he stood swaying and blinking, trying to keep his balance. The “M” branded on his cheek stood out, an angry red against the pallid skin.

Distracted by Bobby’s faint, I had ignored the sounds coming from the other side of the house. Now, though, I became aware of voices, and approaching footsteps.

Jamie and the two Browns came into sight round the corner of the house, then stopped, seeing us. Jamie had been frowning slightly; the frown grew deeper. The Browns, by contrast, seemed oddly elated, though in a grim sort of way.

“So it’s true, then.” Richard Brown stared hard at Bobby Higgins, then turned to Jamie. “You’ve a murderer on your premises!”