Written in My Own Heart's Blood (96 page)

I laughed.

“Well, they’ll be having an interesting night of it, then—all of them.” I told him about Dottie’s request in camp, Rachel’s advent, and our ad hoc session of premarital counseling.

“Ye told them
what
?” He snorted with amusement. “Ye make
me
say, ‘Oh, God,’ all the time, Sassenach, and it’s mostly not to do wi’ bed at all.”

“I can’t help it if you’re naturally disposed to that expression,” I said. “You
do
say it in bed with no little frequency. You even said it on our wedding night. Repeatedly. I remember.”

“Well, little wonder, Sassenach, wi’ all the things ye did to me on our wedding night.”

“What I did to
you
?” I said, indignant. “What on earth did I do to you?”

“Ye bit me,” he said instantly.

“Oh, I did not! Where?”

“Here and there,” he said evasively, and I elbowed him. “Oh, all right—ye bit me on the lip when I kissed ye.”

“I don’t recall doing that at all,” I said, eyeing him. His features were invisible, but the moonglow off the water as he walked cast his bold, straightnosed
profile in silhouette. “I remember you kissing me for quite a long time while you were trying to unbutton my gown, but I’m sure I didn’t bite you then.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully, and ran a hand lightly down my back. “It was later. After I went out to fetch ye some food, and Rupert and Murtagh and the rest all chaffed me. I know, because it was when I drank some o’ the wine I’d fetched back, I noticed it burned the cut in my lip. And I bedded ye again before I got round to the wine, so it must ha’ been that time.”

“Ha,” I said. “By that time, you wouldn’t have noticed if I’d bitten your head off like a praying mantis. You’d got it properly up your nose and thought you knew everything.”

He put an arm round my shoulders, pulled me close, and whispered in my ear, “I’d got it properly up
you, a nighean
. And ye weren’t noticing all that much yourself, besides what was goin’ on between your legs.”

“Rather hard to ignore that sort of carry-on,” I said primly.

He gave the breath of a laugh and, stopping under a tree, gathered me in and kissed me. He had a lovely soft mouth.

“Well, I willna deny ye taught me my business, Sassenach,” he murmured. “And ye made a good job of it.”

“You caught on reasonably quickly,” I said. “Natural talent, I suppose.”

“If it was a matter of special training, Sassenach, the human race would ha’ died out long since.” He kissed me again, taking more time over it.

“D’ye think Denny kens what he’s about?” he asked, letting go. “He’s a virtuous wee man, aye?”

“Oh, I’m sure he knows everything he needs to,” I protested. “He’s a physician, after all.”

Jamie gave a cynical laugh.

“Aye. While he may see the odd whore now and then, it’s likely in the way of his profession, not hers. Besides . . .” He moved close and, putting his hands through the pocket slits in my skirt, took a firm and interesting grip on my bottom. “Do they teach ye in medical college how to spread your wife’s wee hams and lick her from tailbone to navel?”

“
I
didn’t teach you that one!”

“Indeed ye didn’t. And you’re a physician, no?”

“That—I’m sure that doesn’t make any sense. Are you drunk, Jamie?” “Dinna ken,” he said, laughing. “But I’m sure
you
are, Sassenach. Let’s go home,” he whispered, leaning close and drawing his tongue up the side of my neck. “I want ye to make me say, ‘Oh, God,’ for ye.”

“That . . . could be arranged.” I’d cooled down during our walk, but the last five minutes had lit me like a candle, and if I’d wanted to go home and take off my stays before, I was now wondering whether I could wait that long.

“Good,” he said, pulling his hands out of my skirt. “And then I’ll see what I can make
you
say,
mo nighean donn
.”

“See if you can make me say, ‘Don’t stop.’”

PART SIX

The Ties That Bind

THE BODY ELECTRIC

Redondo Beach, CA
December 5, 1980

I
F SHE HADN’T NEEDED
stamps, she wouldn’t have stopped in at the post office. She’d have clipped this batch of letters to the mailbox for the postman to collect, or posted them in the corner mailbox when she took the kids down to the beach to look for pelicans.

But she did need stamps; there were at least a dozen more niggling things to deal with: things needing notarization or photocopies or tax returns or . . .

“S-word,” she muttered, sliding out of the car. “Bloody F-wording S-word!” This was small relief to her feelings of anxiety and oppression. It really wasn’t fair. Who needed the relief of occasional bad language more than a mother of small children?

Maybe she should start using her mother’s “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” instead. Jem had incorporated that one into his own collection of expletives before he turned four and had long since taught it to Mandy; they wouldn’t be warped by hearing it.

It hadn’t been this hard, last time. Well, no, she corrected herself. It had been a lot harder, in the most important respect. But this . . . this . . . this quagmire of pettifogging details—property, bank accounts, leases, notifications . . . She flicked the sheaf of sealed envelopes in her hand against her thigh with irritation. Some days, she would have taken Jem and Mandy by their hands and run, not walked, straight into the stones with no feeling save relief at abandoning all this bloody Stuff.

She hadn’t really had much Stuff when she did it the first time. And, of course, she’d had someone to leave it with. Her heart squeezed a little, remembering the day she’d nailed down the lid on the wooden shipping crate that held her family’s modest history: the silver passed down through her father’s family, cabinet photographs of her mother’s parents, the collection of her father’s first editions, her mother’s World War II Queen Alexandra uniform cap, still with a faint but detectible odor of iodine about it. And taken such pains in writing the note to Roger to go with it:
You told me once that . . . everyone needs a history. This is mine
. . . .

Almost sure then that she’d never see Roger again, let alone the silverware.

She blinked hard and shoved the door of the post office open with so much force that it crashed into the wall, and everyone in the lobby turned to
stare at her. Hot-faced, she grabbed the doorframe and closed it with exaggerated care, then crossed the lobby soft-footed, avoiding all eyes.

She shoved the envelopes through the collection-box slot one by one, with a certain feeling of grim satisfaction at each tedious thing disposed of. Preparing to disappear into the past, leaving all Stuff behind, was one thing; preparing to disappear while thinking that you might eventually come
back
and need that Stuff again—or that your children might come back twenty years later, without you . . . She swallowed. That was something else again, as her father was inclined to say. She couldn’t just dump it all on Uncle Joe; he didn’t—

She turned, glancing across the lobby automatically at her PO box, and stopped, seeing the letter. She felt the hairs rising on her forearm as she strode across the grubby linoleum and reached for the knob, even before her mind had consciously registered the fact that it didn’t look like a utility bill, a credit-card application, or any other sort of official mail.

G-H-I-D-E-I . . . the tumblers of the combination lock fell and the heavy little door swung open. And right there in the post office, she smelled heather and peat smoke and the breath of the mountains, so strongly that her eyes blurred and her own breath caught in her throat.

It was a regular white envelope, addressed to her in Joe Abernathy’s round, capable hand. She could feel something inside it, another envelope, this one with a lump on it—a seal of some kind? She made it to her rented car before ripping it open.

It wasn’t an envelope but a sheet of paper, folded and sealed with wax, blurs of black ink bleeding through the paper where a quill had scratched too deep. An eighteenth-century letter. She pressed it to her face, inhaling, but the scent of smoke and heather was gone—if it had ever been there. It smelled now only of age and brittle paper; not even the tang of the iron-gall ink was left.

There was a brief note from Uncle Joe, a slip of paper folded next to the letter.

She folded the note carefully, pressing the creases, tucking it into her handbag. She felt as though she ought to go somewhere else to read the letter, somewhere private and quiet, so she could go to pieces without anyone
noticing. The seal was sooty gray candle wax, not sealing wax, and Roger had sealed it with his thumbprint. It wasn’t necessary—she’d recognized the writing immediately—but there was no doubt of the tiny hook-shaped scar left when a scaling knife had slipped while he was cleaning a salmon he and Jem had caught in Loch Ness. She’d kissed it while the cut was healing, and a dozen times since.

But she couldn’t wait and, hands trembling, opened her pocketknife and carefully pried off the seal, trying not to break it. It was old and brittle; the candle grease had seeped into the paper over the years, making a shadow around the glob of wax, and it shattered in her hand. She clutched the fragments convulsively and turned the folded paper over.

Brianna Randall Fraser MacKenzie
, he’d written on the front.
To be kept until called for
.

That made her laugh, but the sound came out as a sob, and she dashed the back of her hand across her eyes, desperate to read.

The very first words made her drop the letter as though it were on fire.

She snatched it back up. Lest she somehow miss it, he’d underlined
1739
.

“How in bloody
hell
did you—” she said aloud, and clapped a hand over her mouth, where she kept it as she read the rest.

She didn’t realize that she was crying, until the tears running down her face tickled her hand.

“Oh, Roger,” she said. “Oh, dear
God
.”

IN THE LATE
evening, with the kids safely asleep and the sound of the Pacific Ocean washing through the open balcony doors, Brianna took out a bound notebook, brand-new, and a Fisher Space Pen (guaranteed to write upside down, underwater, and in conditions of zero gravity), which she thought entirely appropriate to this particular piece of composition.

She sat down under a good light, paused for a moment, then got up and poured a glass of cold white wine, which she set on the table beside her notebook. She’d been composing bits of this in her mind all day and so began with no difficulty.

There was no telling how old the kids might be when—or if—they read it, so she made no effort to simplify things. It wasn’t a simple matter.

A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR TIME TRAVELERS—PART II

Right. Dad’s written down what we think we know about this, in terms of observation of occurrence, physical effects, and morality. This next part could best be described as preliminary hypotheses of cause: how time travel might work. I’d call it the scientific part, but you can’t actually apply the scientific method very far with the scanty data we have available
.

Any scientific approach starts with observations, though, and we have enough of those to maybe construct a rough series of hypotheses. Testing those . . .

The idea of testing those made Brianna’s hand shake so badly that she was obliged to set down her pen and breathe slowly for two or three minutes, until the black spots stopped swarming in front of her eyes. Gritting her teeth, she wrote:

Hypothesis 1: That the time passages/vortices/whatever the bloody hell they are/ are caused by or occur at the crossing of ley lines. (Defined here as lines of geomagnetic force, rather the folkloric definition of straight map lines drawn between ancient structures like hill forts, henges, or places of ancient worship, like saints’ pools. Supposition is that folkloric lines may be identical or parallel with geomagnetic lines, but no hard evidence to this effect.)

Evidence in Support of Hypothesis: Some. But to start with, we don’t know whether the standing stones are part of the vortex thingy or just markers set up when ancient people saw other ancient people step on the grass right . . . there . . . and poof!

“Poof,” she muttered to herself, and reached for the glass of wine. She’d planned to drink it as a reward when she’d finished, but at the moment felt more in need of first aid than reward. “I
wish
it was just poof.” One sip, two, then she set it down, the citric edge of the wine lingering pleasantly on her tongue.

“Where were we? Oh, poof . . .”

Dad was able to connect a lot of the folkloric leys to standing stone circles. It would theoretically be possible to check the geomagnetic polarity of the rock around standing stone circles; that should actually go some way toward supporting Hypothesis 1, but might be a little difficult to execute. That is, you can measure the earth’s magnetic field—Carl Friedrich Gauss figured out how to do it back in 1835 or so—but it isn’t the sort of thing individuals do much
.

Governments that do geological surveys have the equipment for it; I know the British Geological Survey’s Eskdalemuir Observatory does, because I saw a write-up on them. And I quote: “Such observatories can measure and forecast magnetic conditions such as magnetic storms that sometimes affect communications, electric power, and other human activities.”

“Other human activities,” she muttered. “Riiight . . .”

The army does this sort of thing, too
, she wrote as an afterthought. “Yes, I’ll get the army right on that. . . .”

The pen hovered over the page as she thought, but she couldn’t add anything else useful there, and so went on:

Hypothesis 2: That entering a time vortex with a gemstone (preferably faceted
, vide
remarks made by Geillis Duncan to this effect) offers some protection to the traveler in terms of physical effect
.

Query: why facets? We used mostly unfaceted ones coming back through Ocracoke, and we know of other travelers using plain unfaceted ones
.

Speculation: Joe Abernathy told me about one of his patients, an archaeologist who told him about some study done on standing stones up in Orkney, where they discovered that the stones have interesting tonal qualities; if you strike them with wooden sticks or other stones, you get a kind of musical note. Any kind of crystal—and all gems have a crystalline interior structure—has a characteristic vibration when struck; that’s how quartz watches work
.