before her death?
She seemed to feel his stiffening, for the edge of her mouth lifted in what he thought was meant as a smile of reassurance.
“I think I need not ask what it is, just yet,” she said. “But I do have a question for you. MacKenzie—do you want to go home?”
“Home?” He repeated the word blankly.
“To Scotland.” She was watching him intently. “I know who you are,” she said. “Not your name, but that you’re one of John’s Jacobite prisoners. My husband told me.”
Jamie watched her warily, but she didn’t seem upset; no more so than would be natural in a woman who has just lost a daughter and gained a grandson, at least.
“I hope you will forgive the deception, milady,” he said. “His Lordship—”
“Wished to save me distress,” Lady Dunsany finished for him. “Yes, I know. William worries too much.” Still, the deep line between her brows relaxed a bit at the thought of her husband’s concern. The sight, with its underlying echo of marital devotion, gave him a faint and unexpected pang.
“We are not rich—you will have gathered that from Ellesmere’s remarks,” Lady Dunsany went on. “Helwater is rather heavily in debt. My grandson, however, is now the possessor of one of the largest fortunes in the county.”
There seemed nothing to say to this but “Aye, milady?” though it made him feel rather like the parrot who lived in the main salon. He had seen it as he crept stealthily through the flowerbeds at sunset the day before, taking the chance of approaching the house while the family were dressing for dinner, in an attempt to catch a glimpse through a window of the new Earl of Ellesmere.
“We are very retired here,” she went on. “We seldom visit London, and my husband has little influence in high circles. But—”
“Aye, milady?” He had some inkling by now of where her ladyship was heading with this roundabout conversation, and a feeling of sudden excitement hollowed the space beneath his ribs.
“John—Lord John Grey, that is—comes from a family with considerable influence. His stepfather is—well, that’s of no consequence.” She shrugged, the small black-linen shoulders dismissing the details.
“The point is that it might be possible to exert sufficient influence on your behalf to have you released from the conditions of your parole, so that you might return to Scotland. So I have come to ask you—do you want to go home, MacKenzie?”
He felt quite breathless, as though someone had punched him very hard in the stomach.
Scotland. To go away from this damp, spongy atmosphere, set foot on that forbidden road and walk it with a free, long stride, up into the crags and along the deer trails, to feel the air clearing and sharpening with the scent of gorse and heather. To go home!
To be a stranger no longer. To go away from hostility and loneliness, come down into Lallybroch, and see his sister’s face light with joy at the sight of him, feel her arms around his waist, Ian’s hug about his shoulders and the pummeling, grasping clutch of the children’s hands, tugging at his clothes.
To go away, and never to see or hear of his own child again. He stared at Lady Dunsany, his face quite blank, so that she should not guess at the turmoil her offer had caused within him.
He had, at last, found the baby yesterday, lying asleep in a basket near the nursery window on the second floor. Perched precariously on the branch of a huge Norway spruce, he had strained his eyes to see through the screen of needles that hid him.
The child’s face had been visible only in profile, one fat cheek resting on its ruffled shoulder. Its cap had slipped awry, so he could see the smooth, arching curve of the tiny skull, lightly dusted with a pale gold fuzz.
“Thank God it isn’t red,” had been his first thought, and he had crossed himself in reflexive thanksgiving.
“God, he’s so small!” had been his second, coupled with an overwhelming urge to step through the window and pick the boy up. The smooth, beautifully shaped head would just fit, resting in the palm of his hand, and he could feel in memory the small squirming body that he had held so briefly to his heart.
“You’re a strong laddie,” he had whispered. “Strong and braw and bonny. But my God, you are so small!”
Lady Dunsany was waiting patiently. He bowed his head respectfully to her, not knowing whether he was making a terrible mistake, but unable to do otherwise.
“I thank ye, milady, but—I think I shall not go…just yet.”
One pale eyebrow quivered slightly, but she inclined her head to him with equal grace.
“As you wish, MacKenzie. You have only to ask.”
She turned like a tiny clockwork figure and left, going back to the world of Helwater, a thousand times more his prison now than it had ever been.
16
WILLIE
To his extreme surprise, the next few years were in many ways among the happiest of Jamie Fraser’s life, aside from the years of his marriage.
Relieved of responsibility for tenants, followers, or anyone at all beyond himself and the horses in his charge, life was relatively simple. While the coroner’s court had taken no notice of him, Jeffries had let slip enough about the death of Ellesmere that the other servants treated him with distant respect, but did not presume on his company.
He had enough to eat, sufficient clothes to keep warm and decent, and the occasional discreet letter from the Highlands reassured him that similar conditions obtained there.
One unexpected benefit of the quiet life at Helwater was that he had somehow resumed his odd half-friendship with Lord John Grey. The Major had, as promised, appeared once each quarter, staying each time for a few days to visit with the Dunsanys. He had made no attempt to gloat, though, or even to speak with Jamie, beyond the barest formal inquiry.
Very slowly, Jamie had realized all that Lady Dunsany had implied, in her offer to have him released. “John—Lord John Grey, that is—comes from a family with considerable influence. His stepfather is—well, that’s of no consequence,” she had said. It was of consequence, though. It had not been His Majesty’s pleasure that had brought him here, rather than condemning him to the perilous ocean crossing and near-slavery in America; it had been John Grey’s influence.
And he had not done it for revenge or from indecent motives, for he never gloated, made no advances; never said anything beyond the most commonplace civilities. No, he had brought Jamie here because it was the best he could do; unable simply to release him at the time, Grey had done his best to ease the conditions of captivity—by giving him air, and light, and horses.
It took some effort, but he did it. When Grey next appeared in the stableyard on his quarterly visit, Jamie had waited until the Major was alone, admiring the conformation of a big sorrel gelding. He had come to stand beside Grey, leaning on the fence. They watched the horse in silence for several minutes.
“King’s pawn to king four,” Jamie said quietly at last, not looking at the man beside him.
He felt the other’s start of surprise, and felt Grey’s eyes on him, but didn’t turn his head. Then he felt the creak of the wood beneath his forearm as Grey turned back, leaning on the fence again.
“Queen’s knight to queen bishop three,” Grey replied, his voice a little huskier than usual.
Since then, Grey had come to the stables during each visit, to spend an evening perched on Jamie’s crude stool, talking. They had no chessboard and seldom played verbally, but the late-night conversations continued—Jamie’s only connection with the world beyond Helwater, and a small pleasure to which both of them looked forward once each quarter.
Above everything else, he had Willie. Helwater was dedicated to horses; even before the boy could stand solidly on his feet, his grandfather had him propped on a pony to be led round the paddock. By the time Willie was three, he was riding by himself—under the watchful eye of MacKenzie, the groom.
Willie was a strong, courageous, bonny little lad. He had a blinding smile, and could charm birds from the trees if he
liked. He was also remarkably spoilt. As the ninth Earl of Ellesmere and the only heir to both Ellesmere and Helwater, with neither mother nor father to keep him under control, he ran roughshod over his doting grandparents, his young aunt, and every servant in the place—except MacKenzie.
And that was a near thing. So far, threats of not allowing the boy to help him with the horses had sufficed to quash Willie’s worst excesses in the stables, but sooner or later, threats alone were not going to be sufficient, and MacKenzie the groom found himself wondering just what was going to happen when he finally lost his own control and clouted the wee fiend.
As a lad, he would himself have been beaten senseless by the nearest male relative within earshot, had he ever dared to address a woman the way he had heard Willie speak to his aunt and the maidservants, and the impulse to haul Willie into a deserted box stall and attempt to correct his manners was increasingly frequent.
Still, for the most part, he had nothing but joy in Willie. The boy adored MacKenzie, and as he grew older would spend hours in his company, riding on the huge draft horses as they pulled the heavy roller through the high fields, and perched precariously on the hay wagons as they came down from the upper pastures in summer.
There was a threat to this peaceful existence, though, which grew greater with each passing month. Ironically, the threat came from Willie himself, and was one he could not help.
“What a handsome little lad he is, to be sure! And such a lovely little rider!” It was Lady Grozier who spoke, standing on the veranda with Lady Dunsany to admire Willie’s peregrinations on his pony around the edge of the lawn.
Willie’s grandmother laughed, eyeing the boy fondly. “Oh, yes. He loves his pony. We have a terrible time getting him even to come indoors for meals. And he’s even more fond of his groom. We joke sometimes that he spends so much time with MacKenzie that he’s even starting to look like MacKenzie!”
Lady Grozier, who had of course paid no attention to a groom, now glanced in MacKenzie’s direction.
“Why, you’re right!” she exclaimed, much amused. “Just look; Willie’s got just that same cock to his head, and the same set to his shoulders! How funny!”
Jamie bowed respectfully to the ladies, but felt cold sweat pop out on his face.
He had seen this coming, but hadn’t wanted to believe the resemblance was sufficiently pronounced as to be visible to anyone but himself. Willie as a baby had been fat and pudding-faced, and resembled no one at all. As he had grown, though, the pudginess had vanished from cheeks and chin, and while his nose was still the soft snub of childhood, the hint of high, broad cheekbones was apparent, and the slaty-blue eyes of babyhood had grown dark blue and clear, thickly fringed with sooty lashes, and slightly slanted in appearance.
Once the ladies had gone into the house, and he could be sure no one was watching, Jamie passed a hand furtively over his own features. Was the resemblance truly that great? Willie’s hair was a soft middle brown, with just a tinge of his mother’s chestnut gleam. And those large, translucent ears—surely his own didn’t stick out like that?
The trouble was that Jamie Fraser had not actually seen himself clearly for several years. Grooms did not have looking glasses, and he had sedulously avoided the company of the maids, who might have provided him with one.
Moving to the watering trough, he bent over it, casually, as though inspecting one of the water striders that skated over its surface. Beneath the wavering surface, flecked with floating bits of hay and crisscrossed by the dimpling striders, his own face stared up at him.
He swallowed, and saw the reflection’s throat move. It was by no means a complete resemblance, but it was definitely there. More in the set and shape of the head and shoulders, as Lady Grozier had observed—but most definitely the eyes as well. Fraser eyes; his father, Brian, had had them, and his sister, Jenny, as well. Let the boy’s bones go on pressing through his skin; let the child-snub nose grow long and straight, and the cheekbones still broader—and anyone would be able to see it.
The reflection in the trough vanished as he straightened up, and stood, staring blindly at the stable that had been home for the last several years. It was July and the sun was hot, but it made no impression on the chill that numbed his fingers and sent a shiver up his back.
It was time to speak to Lady Dunsany.
* * *
By the middle of September, everything had been arranged. The pardon had been procured; John Grey had brought it the day before. Jamie had a small amount of money saved, enough for traveling expenses, and Lady Dunsany had given him a decent horse. The only thing that remained was to bid farewell to his acquaintances at Helwater—and Willie.
“I shall be leaving tomorrow.” Jamie spoke matter-of-factly, not taking his eyes off the bay mare’s fetlock. The horny growth he was filing flaked away, leaving a dust of coarse black shavings on the stable floor.
“Where are you going? To Derwentwater? Can I come with you?” William, Viscount Dunsany, ninth Earl of Ellesmere, hopped down from the edge of the box stall, landing with a thump that made the bay mare start and snort.
“Don’t do that,” Jamie said automatically. “Have I not told ye to move quiet near Milly? She’s skittish.”
“Why?”
“You’d be skittish, too, if I squeezed your knee.” One big hand darted out and pinched the muscle just above the boy’s knee. Willie squeaked and jerked back, giggling.
“Can I ride Millyflower when you’re done, Mac?”
“No,” Jamie answered patiently, for the dozenth time that day. “I’ve told ye a thousand times, she’s too big for ye yet.”
“But I want to ride her!”
Jamie sighed but didn’t answer, instead moving around to the other side of Milles Fleurs and picking up the left hoof.
“I said I want to ride Milly!”
“I heard ye.”
“Then saddle her for me! Right now!”
The ninth Earl of Ellesmere had his chin thrust out as far as it would go, but the defiant look in his eye was tempered with a certain doubt as he intercepted Jamie’s cold blue gaze. Jamie set the horse’s hoof down slowly, just as slowly stood up, and drawing himself to his full height of six feet four, put his hands on his hips, looked down at the Earl, three feet six, and said, very softly, “No.”
“Yes!” Willie stamped his foot on the hay-strewn floor. “You have to do what I tell you!”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do!”
“No, I…” Shaking his head hard enough to make the red hair fly about his ears, Jamie pressed his lips tight together, then squatted down in front of the boy.
“See here,” he said, “I havena got to do what ye say, for I’m no longer going to be groom here. I told ye, I shall be leaving tomorrow.”
Willie’s face went quite blank with shock, and the freckles on his nose stood out dark against the fair skin.
“You can’t!” he said. “You can’t leave.”
“I have to.”
“No!” The small Earl clenched his jaw, which gave him a truly startling resemblance to his paternal great-grandfather. Jamie thanked his stars that no one at Helwater had likely ever seen Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat. “I won’t let you go!”
“For once, my lord, ye have nothing to say about it,” Jamie replied firmly, his distress at leaving tempered somewhat by finally being allowed to speak his mind to the boy.
“If you leave…” Willie looked around helplessly for a threat, and spotted one easily to hand. “If you leave,” he repeated more confidently, “I’ll scream and shout and scare all the horses, so there!”
“Make a peep, ye little fiend, and I’ll smack ye a good one!” Freed from his usual reserve, and alarmed at the thought of this spoiled brat upsetting the highly-strung and valuable horses, Jamie glared at the boy.
The Earl’s eyes bulged with rage, and his face went red. He took a deep breath, then whirled and ran down the length of the stable, shrieking and waving his arm
s.
Milles Fleurs, already on edge from having her hoofs fiddled with, reared and plunged, neighing loudly. Her distress was echoed by kicks and high-pitched whinnying from the box stalls nearby, where Willie was roaring out all the bad words he knew—no small store—and kicking frenziedly at the doors of the stalls.
Jamie succeeded in catching Milles Fleurs’s lead-rope and with considerable effort, managed to get the mare outside without damage to himself or the horse. He tied her to the paddock fence, and then strode back into the stable to deal with Willie.
“Damn, damn, damn!” the Earl was shrieking. “Sluire! Quim! Shit! Swive!”
Without a word, Jamie grabbed the boy by the collar, lifted him off his feet and carried him, kicking and squirming, to the farrier’s stool he had been using. Here he sat down, flipped the Earl over his knee, and smacked his buttocks five or six times, hard. Then he jerked the boy up and set him on his feet.
“I hate you!” The Viscount’s tear-smudged face was bright red and his fists trembled with rage.
“Well, I’m no verra fond of you either, ye little bastard!” Jamie snapped.
Willie drew himself up, fists clenched, purple in the face.
“I’m not a bastard!” he shrieked. “I’m not, I’m not! Take it back! Nobody can say that to me! Take it back, I said!”
Jamie stared at the boy in shock. There had been talk, then, and Willie had heard it. He had delayed his going too long.
He drew a deep breath, and then another, and hoped that his voice would not tremble.
“I take it back,” he said softly. “I shouldna have used the word, my lord.”
He wanted to kneel and embrace the boy, or pick him up and comfort him against his shoulder—but that was not a gesture a groom might make to an earl, even a young one. The palm of his left hand stung, and he curled his fingers tight over the only fatherly caress he was ever likely to give his son.
Willie knew how an earl should behave; he was making a masterful effort to subdue his tears, sniffing ferociously and swiping at his face with a sleeve.
“Allow me, my lord.” Jamie did kneel then, and wiped the little boy’s face gently with his own coarse handkerchief. Willie’s eyes looked at him over the cotton folds, red-rimmed and woeful.
“Have you really got to go, Mac?” he asked, in a very small voice.
“Aye, I have.” He looked into the dark blue eyes, so heartbreakingly like his own, and suddenly didn’t give a damn what was right or who saw. He pulled the boy roughly to him, hugging him tight against his heart, holding the boy’s face close to his shoulder, that Willie might not see the quick tears that fell into his thick, soft hair.
Willie’s arms went around his neck and clung tight. He could feel the small, sturdy body shake against him with the force of suppressed sobbing. He patted the flat little back, and smoothed Willie’s hair, and murmured things in Gaelic that he hoped the boy would not understand.
At length, he took the boy’s arms from his neck and put him gently away.
“Come wi’ me to my room, Willie; I shall give ye something to keep.”
He had long since moved from the hayloft, taking over Hughes’s snuggery beside the tack room when the elderly head groom retired. It was a small room, and very plainly furnished, but it had the twin virtues of warmth and privacy.
Besides the bed, the stool, and a chamber pot, there was a small table, on which stood the few books that he owned, a large candle in a pottery candlestick, and a smaller candle, thick and squat, that stood to one side before a small statue of the Virgin. It was a cheap wooden carving that Jenny had sent him, but it had been made in France, and was not without artistry.
“What’s that little candle for?” Willie asked. “Grannie says only stinking Papists burn candles in front of heathen images.”
“Well, I am a stinking Papist,” Jamie said, with a wry twist of his mouth. “It’s no a heathen image, though; it’s a statue of the Blessed Mother.”
“You are?” Clearly this revelation only added to the boy’s fascination. “Why do Papists burn candles before statues, then?”
Jamie rubbed a hand through his hair. “Aye, well. It’s…maybe a way of praying—and remembering. Ye light the candle, and say a prayer and think of people ye care for. And while it burns, the flame remembers them for ye.”
“Who do you remember?” Willie glanced up at him. His hair was standing on end, rumpled by his earlier distress, but his blue eyes were clear with interest.
“Oh, a good many people. My family in the Highlands—my sister and her family. Friends. My wife.” And sometimes the candle burned in memory of a young and reckless girl named Geneva, but he did not say that.
Willie frowned. “You haven’t got a wife.”
“No. Not anymore. But I remember her always.”
Willie put out a stubby forefinger and cautiously touched the little statue. The woman’s hands were spread in welcome, a tender maternity engraved on the lovely face.
“I want to be a stinking Papist, too,” Willie said firmly.
“Ye canna do that!” Jamie exclaimed, half-amused, half-touched at the notion. “Your grandmama and your auntie would go mad.”