Written in My Own Heart's Blood (105 page)

REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN’T GO AWAY

R
OGER TURNED HIS
horse’s head toward Lallybroch, knowing nowhere else to go. He’d taken leave of Brian Fraser six weeks before and had been sad at what he’d thought was a permanent parting. His heart was eased a little now at the thought of seeing Brian again. Also at the certainty of a sympathetic ear, even though there was little he could openly discuss with him.

He’d have to tell Brian, of course, that he hadn’t found Jem. That thought was a thorn in his heart, and one felt at every beat. For the last weeks, he had been able to put the brutal ache of Jemmy’s absence aside for a little, hoping that somehow, finding Jerry might also lead to finding Jem. But it hadn’t.

What the devil it
did
mean was a complete mystery. Had he found the only Jeremiah there was to be found here? If he had . . . where
was
Jem?

He wanted to tell Brian that he’d found the man to whom the identity disks belonged—Brian would ask. But how to do so without divulging either Jerry’s identity, Roger’s relationship with him—or explaining what had happened to him? He sighed, reining his horse around a large puddle in the road. Maybe better to say simply that he’d failed, hadn’t found J. W. MacKenzie—though it troubled him to lie outright to such an openhearted man.

And he couldn’t discuss Buck, either. Beyond thought of Jem, Buck was the matter lying heaviest on his mind at the moment.

“Ye’ll never make a decent minister, if ye can’t be honest.”
He’d tried to be. The honest truths of the situation from his own selfish point of view were
that he’d miss Buck’s company badly, that he was deeply jealous of the possibility that Buck
might
make it to Brianna, and—not least, he assured himself—that he was terrified that Buck
wouldn’t
make it through the stones again. He’d die in the void, or maybe be lost once more, alone in some random time.

The truth for Buck was that while it could be argued (and with no little force) that Buck should remove himself forthwith and permanently from the vicinity of Geillis Duncan, going through the stones was maybe the least desirable means of ensuring such an outcome.

To accept Buck’s gallant gesture was a temptation, though. If he
could
make it, tell Bree where Roger was . . . Roger didn’t think Buck could come back, though. The effects of travel were cumulative, and Hector McEwan likely wouldn’t be standing by next time.

But if Buck was willing to risk the crossing, in spite of the very real danger to his own life, surely it was Roger’s obligation to try to persuade him to return to his own wife, rather than to Roger’s?

He brushed the back of his hand against his lips, feeling in memory the softness of Morag’s brown hair on his cheek when he’d bent to kiss her forehead on the banks of the Alamance. The gentle trust in her eyes—and the fact that she’d bloody saved his own life very shortly thereafter. His fingers rested for an instant on his throat, and he realized, with the flicker of surprise that attends recognition of things already long known, that whatever the bitterness of his regrets about his voice, he’d never for an instant wished that she
hadn’t
saved him.

When Stephen Bonnet would have thrown Morag’s son overboard, Roger had saved the child from drowning, and that at some risk to his own life. But he didn’t think she’d done what she’d done at Alamance in payment of that debt. She’d done it because she didn’t want him to die.

Well. He didn’t want Buck to die.

Did Morag
want
Buck back? Buck thought not, but he might be wrong. Roger was fairly sure that the man still loved Morag and that his abnegation was due as much to Buck’s own sense of personal failure as to what he thought Morag’s desires might be.

“Even if that’s true,” he said aloud, “where do I get off trying to manage people’s lives?”

He shook his head and rode on through a light mist that wove shreds of fog through the wet black spikiness of the gorse. It wasn’t raining, that was one thing, though the sky bore a burden of cloud that brought it down to shroud the tops of the nearby mountains.

He’d never asked his adoptive father anything about the art of being a priest; it was the last thing he’d ever thought of being. But he’d grown up in the Reverend’s house and had seen parishioners come every day to the comfortably shabby study in search of help or advice. He remembered his father (and now felt a new oddness in the word, layered as it was with the freshness of Jerry MacKenzie’s physical presence), remembered him sitting down with a sigh to drink tea in the kitchen with Mrs. Graham, shaking his head in response to her questioning look and saying,
“Sometimes there’s nothing you can give some of them but a friendly ear and a prayer to be going on with.”

He came to a dead stop in the road, closed his eyes, and tried to find a moment’s peace in the chaos of his thoughts. And ended, as every priest since Aaron’s time doubtless had, by throwing up his hands and demanding, “What do You
want
of me? What the hell should I
do
about these people?”

He opened his eyes when he said that, but instead of finding an angel with an illuminated scroll standing before him, he was confronted by the beady yellow eyes of a fat seagull sitting in the road a few feet from his horse and not discomposed in the slightest by the presence of a creature a hundred times its size. The bird gave him an old-fashioned sort of look, then spread its wings and flapped off with a piercing
screek!
This echoed from the hillside above, where a few more gulls wheeled slowly, barely visible against the paper-white sky.

The presence of the gull broke his sense of isolation, at least. He rode on in a calmer frame of mind, resolved only not to think about things until he had to.

He thought he was close to Lallybroch; with luck, would reach it well before dark. His belly rumbled at the prospect of tea, and he felt happier. Whatever he could and couldn’t tell Brian Fraser, just seeing Brian and his daughter Jenny again would be a comfort.

The gulls cried high overhead, still wheeling, and he looked up. Sure enough: he could just make out the low ruins of the Iron Age hill fort up there, the ruins he’d rebuilt—would rebuild? What if he never got back to—
Jesus, don’t even think about it, man, it’ll drive you crazier than you are already
.

He nudged the horse and it reluctantly accelerated a bit. It accelerated a lot faster in the next moment, when a crashing noise came from the hillside just above.

“Whoa! Whoa, you eedjit! Whoa, I said!” These adjurations, along with a heave of the reins to bring the horse’s head around, had an effect, and they ended facing back the way they’d come, to see a young boy standing, panting, in the middle of the road, his red hair all on end, nearly brown in the muted light.

“Daddy,” he said, and his face lit as though touched by a sudden sun. “Daddy!”

ROGER HADN’T ANY
memory of leaving his horse or running down the road. Or of anything else. He was sitting in the mud and the mist in a patch of wet bracken with his son hugged tight to his chest, and nothing else mattered in the world.

“Dad,” Jem kept saying, gasping with sobs, “Daddy, Daddy . . .”

“I’m here,” he whispered into Jem’s hair, the tears running down his own face. “I’m here, I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

Jem took a shuddering breath, managed to say, “I’m
not
afraid,” and cried some more.

At last, a sense of time crept back, along with the sensation of water soaking
through the seat of his breeches. He breathed and shuddered a bit himself, smoothed Jem’s hair, and kissed his head.

“You smell like a goat,” he said, swallowed, brushed at his eyes with the back of a hand, and laughed. “Where the
hell
have you been?”

“In the broch with Mandy,” Jem said, as though this was the most natural statement in the world. He gave Roger a faintly accusing look. “Where have
you
been?”

“Mandy?” Roger said blankly. “What do you mean Mandy?”

“My sister,” Jem said, with the patience children occasionally show for the denseness of their parents. “
You
know.”

“Well . . . where
is
Mandy, then?” In Roger’s state of surreal confusion, Mandy might just as well have popped up beside Jem like a mushroom.

Jem’s face went momentarily blank with confusion, and he glanced round as though expecting Mandy to materialize out of the moss and heather at any moment.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding mildly puzzled. “She ran away to find you, and then Mam fell down and broke something and—”

Roger had let go of Jem but grabbed him again at this, startling the breath out of the boy.

“Your mother’s here,
too
?”

“Well, sure,” Jem said, sounding mildly annoyed. “I mean—not
here
here. She’s up there, in the old fort. She tripped on a rock when we were running to catch Mandy.”

“Jesus, Lord,” Roger said fervently, taking a stride in the direction of the fort, then halting abruptly. “Wait: you said she broke something—she’s hurt?”

Jem shrugged. He was beginning to look worried again, but not very worried. Dad was here; everything would be okay.

“I don’t think it’s bad,” he assured his father. “She couldn’t walk, though, so she told me to run and catch Mandy. But I found you first.”

“Okay. She’s awake, though, she’s talking?” He had Jem by the shoulders, as much to keep him from disappearing—he half-feared he was hallucinating—as to compel an answer.

“Uh-huh.” Jem was looking vaguely about, a slight frown on his face. “Mandy’s here
someplace
. . . .” Wriggling free, he turned round slowly, face creased in intent concentration.

“Mandy!” Roger shouted up the hill. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled again. “BREE!” He scanned the fort and the hillside anxiously for Bree’s head popping up above the ruins or any sign of agitation among the vegetation that might be occasioned by a scrambling three-year-old. No head showed, but a breeze had come up and the whole hill seemed alive.

“Mandy ran away down this hill?” he asked, and, at Jem’s nod, he glanced behind him. The land flattened out into moor on the other side of the road, and there wasn’t a glimpse of anything that might be Mandy on it. Unless she’d fallen down and was lying in a hollow . . .

“You stay
right here
,” he said to Jem, squeezing his shoulder hard. “I’m going to go up the hill and look. I’ll bring your mother down.” He bounded
up the gravel trace that was the nearest thing there was to a path, calling out Mandy’s name at intervals, torn between overwhelming joy and terrifying panic, lest it not be real, lest he actually had cracked and was simply imagining that Jem was there—he turned at every third step to check that he
was
there, still standing on the road.

Bree
. The thought that she was up there, just above him . . . “Mandy!” he shouted again, his voice cracking. But it cracked from emotion, and he realized in a startled instant that he’d been shouting at full volume for minutes now—and it hadn’t hurt.

“God bless you, Hector,” he said fervently under his breath, and went on, beginning now to zigzag back and forth across the hill, beating through the sticks of dry broom and birch saplings, kicking at gorse and dead ferns in case Mandy should have fallen, maybe knocked herself out on a rock.

He heard the seagulls shriek above, thin and piercing, and looked up, hoping to see Brianna peering over the wall of the fort. She wasn’t, but something called again—thin and piercing, but not a gull.

“Daddeeeee . . .”

He whirled, almost losing his footing, and saw Jem running down the road—and coming round the bend of that road, Buck’s horse with Buck atop him, and a wildly squirming bundle with black curly hair cradled precariously in Buck’s arm.

He couldn’t speak at all by the time he reached them.

“Think ye might have lost something,” Buck said gruffly, and handed Mandy carefully down to him. She was a heavy, lively weight in his arms—and smelled of goats.

“Daddy!” she exclaimed, beaming at him as though he’d just come in from work. “Mwah! Mwah!” She kissed him noisily and snuggled into his chest, her hair tickling his chin.