Dragonfly in Amber

Claire’s fingers brushed his own away, and touched the stone, caressing, as though touching flesh, gently tracing the letters, the grooves worn shallow, but still clear.

  “ ‘JAMES ALEXANDER MALCOLM MACKENZIE FRASER,’ ” she read aloud. “Yes, I know him.” Her hand dropped lower, brushing back the grass that grew thickly about the stone, obscuring the line of smaller letters at its base.

  “ ‘Beloved husband of Claire,’ ” she read.

  “Yes, I knew him,” she said again, so softly Roger could scarcely hear her. “I’m Claire. He was my husband.” She looked up then, into the face of her daughter, white and shocked above her. “And your father,” she said.

  Roger and Brianna stared down at her, and the kirkyard was silent, save for the rustle of the yews above.

  * * *

  “No!” I said, quite crossly. “For the fifth time—no! I don’t want a drink of water. I have not got a touch of the sun. I am not faint. I am not ill. And I haven’t lost my mind, either, though I imagine that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Roger and Brianna exchanged glances that made it clear that that was precisely what they were thinking. They had, between them, got me out of the kirkyard and into the car. I had refused to be taken to hospital, so we had gone back to the manse. Roger had administered medicinal whisky for shock, but his eyes darted toward the telephone now as though wondering whether to dial for additional help—like a straitjacket, I supposed.

  “Mama.” Brianna spoke soothingly, reaching out to try to smooth the hair back from my face. “You’re upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset!” I snapped. I took a long, quivering breath and clamped my lips tight together, until I could trust myself to speak calmly.

  “I am certainly upset,” I began, “but I’m not mad.” I stopped, struggling for control. This wasn’t the way I’d intended to do it. I didn’t know quite what I had intended, but not this, blurting out the truth without preparation or time to organize my own thoughts. Seeing that bloody grave had disrupted any plan I might have formed.

  “Damn you, Jamie Fraser!” I said, furious. “What are you doing there anyway; it’s miles from Culloden!”

  Brianna’s eyes were halfway out on stalks, and Roger’s hand was hovering near the telephone. I stopped abruptly and tried to get a grip on myself.

  Be calm, Beauchamp, I instructed myself. Breathe deeply. Once…twice…once more. Better. Now. It’s very simple; all you have to do is tell them the truth. That’s what you came to Scotland for, isn’t it?

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I closed my mouth, and my eyes as well, hoping that my nerve would return, if I couldn’t see the two ashen faces in front of me. Just…let…me…tell…the…truth, I prayed, with no idea who I was talking to. Jamie, I thought.

  I’d told the truth once before. It hadn’t gone well.

  I pressed my eyelids shut more tightly. Once more I could smell the carbolic surroundings of a hospital, and feel the unfamiliar starched pillowcase beneath my cheek. From the corridor outside came Frank’s voice, choked with baffled rage.

  “What do you mean, don’t press her? Don’t press her? My wife’s been gone for nearly three years, and come back filthy, abused, and pregnant, for God’s sake, and I’m not to ask questions?”

  And the doctor’s voice, murmuring soothingly. I caught the words “delusion,” and “traumatic state,” and “leave it for later, old man—just for a bit” as Frank’s voice, still arguing and interrupting, was gently but firmly eased down the hall. That so-familiar voice, which raised anew the storm of grief and rage and terror inside me.

  I had curled my body into a defensive ball, pillow clutched to my chest, and bitten it, as hard as I could, until I felt the cotton casing give way and the silky grit of feathers grinding between my teeth.

  I was grinding them now, to the detriment of a new filling. I stopped, and opened my eyes.

  “Look,” I said, as reasonably as I could. “I’m sorry, I know how it sounds. But it’s true, and nothing I can do about it.”

  This speech did nothing to reassure Brianna, who edged closer to Roger. Roger himself had lost that green-about-the-gills look, though, and was exhibiting signs of cautious interest. Could it be possible that he really did have enough imagination to be able to grasp the truth?

  I took hope from his expression, and unclenched my fists.

  “It’s the bloody stones,” I said. “You know, the standing stone circle, on the fairies’ hill, to the west?”

  “Craigh na Dun,” Roger murmured. “That one?”

  “Right.” I exhaled consciously. “You may know the legends about fairy hills—do you? About people who get trapped in rocky hills and wake up two hundred years later?”

  Brianna was looking more alarmed by the moment.

  “Mother, I really think you ought to go up and lie down,” she said. She half-rose from her seat. “I could go get Fiona…”

  Roger put a hand on her arm to stop her.

  “No, wait,” he said. He looked at me, with the sort of suppressed curiosity a scientist shows when putting a new slide under the microscope. “Go ahead,” he said to me.

  “Thanks,” I said dryly. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to start driveling about fairies; I just thought you’d like to know there’s some basis to the legends. I haven’t any idea what it actually is up there, or how it works, but the fact is…” I took a deep breath, “Well, the fact is, that I walked through a bloody cleft stone in that circle in 1945, and I ended up on the hillside below in 1743.”

  I’d said exactly that to Frank. He’d glared at me for a moment, picked up a vase of flowers from my bedside table, and smashed it on the floor.

  Roger looked like a scientist whose new microbe has come through a winner. I wondered why, but was too engrossed in the struggle to find words that sounded halfway sane.

  * * *

  “The first person I ran into was an English dragoon in full fig,” I said. “Which rather gave me a hint that something was wrong.”

  A sudden smile lighted Roger’s face, though Brianna went on looking horrified. “I should think it might,” he said.

  “The difficulty was that I couldn’t get back, you see.” I thought I’d better address my remarks to Roger, who at least seemed disposed to listen, whether he believed me or not.

  “The thing is, ladies then didn’t go about the place unescorted, and if they did, they didn’t do it wearing print dresses and oxford loafers,” I explained. “Everyone I met, starting with that dragoon captain, knew there was something wrong about me—but they didn’t know what. How could they? I couldn’t explain then any better than I can now—and lunatic asylums back then were much less pleasant places than they are now. No basket weaving,” I added, with an effort at a joke. It wasn’t noticeably successful; Brianna grimaced and looked more worried than ever.

  “That dragoon,” I said, and a brief shudder went over me at the memory of Jonathan Wolverton Randall, Captain of His Majesty’s Eighth Dragoons. “I thought I was hallucinating at first, because the man looked so very like Frank; at first glance, I thought it was he.” I glanced at the table where a copy of one of Frank’s books lay, with its back-cover photograph of a dark and handsome lean-faced man.

  “That’s quite a coincidence,” Roger said. His eyes were alert, fixed on mine.

  “Well, it was and it wasn’t,” I told him, wrenching my eyes with an effort from the stack of books. “You know he was Frank’s ancestor. All the men in that family have a strong family resemblance—physically, at least,” I added, thinking of the rather striking nonphysical differences.

  “What—what was he like?” Brianna seemed to be coming out of her stupor, at least slightly.

  “He was a bloody filthy pervert,” I said. Two pairs of eyes snapped open wide and turned to each other with an identical look of consternation.

  “You needn’t look like that,” I said. “They had perversion in the eighteenth century; it isn’t anything new, you know. Only it w
as worse then, maybe, since no one really cared, so long as things were kept quiet and decent on the surface. And Black Jack Randall was a soldier; he captained a garrison in the Highlands, charged with keeping the clans under control—he had considerable scope for his activities, all officially sanctioned.” I took a restorative gulp from the whisky glass I still held.

  “He liked to hurt people,” I said. “He liked it a lot.”

  “Did he…hurt you?” Roger put the question with some delicacy, after a rather noticeable pause. Bree seemed to be drawing into herself, the skin tightening across her cheekbones.

  “Not directly. Or not much, at least.” I shook my head. I could feel a cold spot in the pit of my stomach, which the whisky was doing little to thaw. Jack Randall had hit me there, once. I felt it in memory, like the ache of a long-healed wound.

  “He had fairly eclectic tastes. But it was Jamie that he.…wanted.” Under no circumstances would I have used the word “loved.” My throat felt thick, and I swallowed the last drops of whisky. Roger held up the decanter, one brow raised questioningly, and I nodded and held out my glass.

  “Jamie. That’s Jamie Fraser? And he was…”

  “He was my husband,” I said.

  Brianna shook her head like a horse driving off flies.

  “But you had a husband,” she said. “You couldn’t…even if…I mean…you couldn’t.”

  “I had to,” I said flatly. “I didn’t do it on purpose, after all.”

  “Mother, you can’t get married accidentally!” Brianna was losing her kindly-nurse-with-mental-patient attitude. I thought this was probably a good thing, even if the alternative was anger.

  “Well, it wasn’t precisely an accident,” I said. “It was the best alternative to being handed over to Jack Randall, though. Jamie married me to protect me—and bloody generous of him, too,” I finished, glaring at Bree over my glass. “He didn’t have to do it, but he did.”

  I fought back the memory of our wedding night. He was a virgin; his hands had trembled when he touched me. I had been afraid too—with better reason. And then in the dawn he had held me, naked back against bare chest, his thighs warm and strong behind my own, murmuring into the clouds of my hair, “Dinna be afraid. There’s the two of us now.”

  “See,” I turned to Roger again, “I couldn’t get back. I was running away from Captain Randall when the Scots found me. A party of cattle-raiders. Jamie was with them, they were his mother’s people, the MacKenzies of Leoch. They didn’t know what to make of me, but they took me with them as a captive. And I couldn’t get away again.”

  I remembered my abortive efforts to escape from Castle Leoch. And then the day when I had told Jamie the truth, and he—not believing, any more than Frank had, but at least willing to act as though he did—had taken me back to the hill and the stones.

  “He thought I was a witch, perhaps,” I said, eyes closed, smiling just a bit at the thought. “Now they think you’re mad; then they thought you were a witch. Cultural mores,” I explained, opening my eyes. “Psychology is just what they call it these days instead of magic. Not the hell of a lot of difference.” Roger nodded, seeming a little stunned.

  “They tried me for witchcraft,” I said. “In the village of Cranesmuir, just below the castle. Jamie saved me, though, and then I told him. And he took me to the hill, and told me to go back. Back to Frank.” I paused and drew a deep breath, remembering that October afternoon, where control of my destiny, taken from me for so long, had been suddenly thrust back into my hands, and the choice not given, but demanded of me.

  “Go back!” he had said. “There’s nothing here for ye! Nothing save danger.”

  “Is there really nothing here for me?” I had asked. Too honorable to speak, he had answered nonetheless, and I had made my choice.

  “It was too late,” I said, staring down at my hands, lying open on my knees. The day was darkening to rain, but my two wedding rings still gleamed in the fading light, gold and silver. I hadn’t taken Frank’s gold band from my left hand when I married Jamie, but had worn Jamie’s silver ring on the fourth finger of my right hand, for every day of the twenty-odd years since he put it there.

  “I loved Frank,” I said quietly, not looking at Bree. “I loved him a lot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t,” I said, raising my head suddenly to Bree in appeal. She stared back at me, stone-faced.

  I looked down at my hands again, and went on.

  “He took me to his own home—Lallybroch, it was called. A beautiful place.” I shut my eyes again, to get away from the look on Brianna’s face, and deliberately summoned the image of the estate of Broch Tuarach—Lallybroch, to the people who lived there. A beautiful Highland farm, with woods and streams; even a bit of fertile ground—rare for the Highlands. A lovely, peaceful place, sealed within high hills above a mountain pass that kept it remote from the recurrent strife that troubled the Highlands. But even Lallybroch had proved only a temporary sanctuary.

  “Jamie was an outlaw,” I said, seeing behind my closed eyelids the scars of flogging that the English had left on his back. A network of thin white lines that webbed the broad shoulders like a branded grid. “There was a price on his head. One of his own tenants betrayed him to the English. They captured him, and took him to Wentworth Prison—to hang him.”

  Roger gave a long, low whistle.

  “Hell of a place,” he remarked. “Have you seen it? The walls must be ten feet thick!”

  I opened my eyes. “They are,” I said wryly. “I’ve been inside them. But even the thickest walls have doors.” I felt a small flicker of the blaze of desperate courage that had taken me inside Wentworth Prison, in pursuit of my heart. If I could do that for you, I told Jamie silently, I can do this as well. But help me, you bloody big Scot—help me!

  “I got him out,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What was left of him. Jack Randall commanded the garrison at Wentworth.” Now I didn’t want to remember the images that my words brought back, but they wouldn’t stop. Jamie, naked and bloody, on the floor of Eldridge Manor, where we had found sanctuary.

  “I wilna let them take me back again, Sassenach,” he’d said to me, teeth clenched against the pain as I’d set the crushed bones of his hand and cleansed his wounds. “Sassenach.” He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for an outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, and then in affection.

  And I hadn’t let them find him; with the help of his kinsman, a little Fraser clansman called Murtagh, I’d gotten him across the Channel to France, and to refuge in the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, where one of his Fraser uncles was abbot. But once there in safety, I had found that saving his life was not the end of the task set me.

  What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I was not sure, even now, what I had done, when I had summoned his demons and fought them single-handed, in the dark of his mind; there is very little difference between medicine and magic, when it comes to some kinds of healing.

  I could still feel the cold, hard stone that bruised me, and the strength of the fury that I had drawn from him, the hands that closed round my neck and the burning creature who had hunted me through the dark.

  “But I did heal him,” I said softly. “He came back to me.”

  Brianna was shaking her head slowly back and forth, bewildered, but with a stubborn set to her head that I knew very well indeed. “Grahams are stupid, Campbells are deceitful, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Frasers are stubborn,” Jamie had told me once, giving me his view of the general characteristics of the clans. He hadn’t been far wrong, either; Frasers were extremely stubborn, not least him. Nor Bree.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. She sat up straighter, eyeing me closely. “I think maybe you’ve been thinking too much about those men at Culloden,” she said. “After all, you’ve be
en under a strain lately, and maybe Daddy’s death…”

  “Frank wasn’t your father,” I said bluntly.

  “He was!” She flashed back with it immediately, so fast that it startled both of us.

  Frank had, in time, bowed to the doctors’ insistence that any attempt to “force me to accept reality,” as one of them put it, might be harmful to my pregnancy. There had been a lot of murmuring in corridors—and shouting, now and then—but he had given up asking me for the truth. And I, in frail health and sick at heart, had given up telling it to him.

  I wasn’t going to give up, this time.

  “I promised Frank,” I said. “Twenty years ago, when you were born. I tried to leave him, and he wouldn’t let me go. He loved you.” I felt my voice soften as I looked at Brianna. “He couldn’t believe the truth, but he knew—of course—that he wasn’t your father. He asked me not to tell you—to let him be your only father—as long as he lived. After that, he said, it was up to me.” I swallowed, licking dry lips.

  “I owed him that,” I said. “Because he loved you. But now Frank’s dead—and you have a right to know who you are.”