“Oh, don’t be ridiculous.” I fidgeted, untying my pocket, not wanting to meet his eyes. I was prickly, discomfited, irritated—and the more discomfited by not really knowing why.
“It was an honest question, Sassenach,” he said quietly. “Not a serious one, maybe—but honest. I think ye maybe owe me an honest answer.”
“Of course I don’t want you to kill him!”
“D’ye want me to tell you why ye slapped me, instead?”
“Why—” I stood with my mouth open for a second, then closed it. “Yes. I do.”
“I touched ye against your will,” he said, his eyes intent on mine. “Didn’t I?”
“You did,” I said, and breathed a little easier. “And so did Tom Christie. And, no, I didn’t like it.”
“But not on Tom’s account,” he finished. “Poor fellow.”
“He wouldn’t want your sympathy,” I said tartly, and he smiled.
“He would not. But he’s got it, nonetheless. Still, I’m glad of it,” he added.
“Glad of what? That he’s alive—or—surely not that he thinks he’s in love with me?” I said, incredulous.
“Dinna belittle his feelings, Sassenach,” he said, more quietly. “He’s laid down his life for ye once. I’d trust him to do it again.”
“I didn’t want him to do it the first time!”
“You’re bothered,” he said, in a tone of clinical interest.
“Yes, I am bloody bothered!” I said. “And”—the thought struck me and I gave him a hard look—“so are you.” I recalled suddenly that he’d said he’d met Tom Christie in the street. What had Tom said to him?
He tilted his head in mild negation, but didn’t deny it.
“I willna say I like Thomas Christie,” he said consideringly, “but I respect him. And I am verra much pleased to find him alive. Ye didna do wrong to grieve him, Sassenach,” he said gently. “I did, too.”
“I hadn’t even thought of that.” In the shock of seeing him, I hadn’t remembered, but I’d wept for him—and for his children. “I don’t regret it, though.”
“Good. The thing about Tom Christie,” he went on, “is that he wants ye. Badly. But he doesna ken a thing about you.”
“And you do.” I left it somewhere between question and challenge, and he smiled. He turned and shot the bolt on the door, then crossed the room and drew the calico curtain on the one small window, casting the room into a pleasant blue dimness.
“Oh, I’ve need and want in plenty—but I’ve knowing, too.” He was standing very close, close enough that I had to look up to him. “I’ve never kissed ye without knowing who ye were—and that’s a thing poor Tom will never know.” God, what had Tom told him?
My pulse, which had been jumping up and down, settled down to a quick, light thump, discernible in my fingertips.
“You didn’t know a thing about me when you married me.”
His hand closed gently on my behind.
“No?”
“Besides that, I mean!”
He made a small Scottish sound in his throat, not quite a chuckle.
“Aye, well, it’s a wise man who kens what he doesna know—and I learn fast, a nighean.”
He drew me gently close then, and kissed me—with thought and tenderness, with knowing—and with my full consent. It didn’t obliterate my memory of Tom Christie’s impassioned, blundering embrace, and I thought it wasn’t meant to; it was meant to show me the difference.
“You can’t be jealous,” I said, a moment later.
“I can,” he said, not joking.
“You can’t possibly think—”
“I don’t.”
“Well, then—”
“Well, then.” His eyes were dark as seawater in the dimness, but the expression in them was entirely readable, and my heart beat faster. “I ken what ye feel for Tom Christie—and he told me plain what he feels for you. Surely ye ken that love’s nothing to do wi’ logic, Sassenach?”
Knowing a rhetorical question when I heard one, I didn’t bother answering that, but instead reached out and tidily unbuttoned his shirt. There was nothing I could reasonably say about Tom Christie’s feelings, but I had another language in which to express my own. His heart was beating fast; I could feel it as though I held it in my hand. Mine was, too, but I breathed deep and took comfort in the warm familiarity of his body, the soft crispness of the cinnamon-colored hairs of his chest, and the gooseflesh that raised them under my fingers. While I was thus engaged, he slid his fingers into my hair, separating a lock which he viewed appraisingly.
“It’s not gone white yet. I suppose I’ve a little time, then, before ye get too dangerous for me to bed.”
“Dangerous, forsooth,” I said, setting to work on the buttons of his breeks. I wished he had on his kilt. “Exactly what do you think I might do to you in bed?”
He scratched his chest consideringly, and rubbed absently at the tiny knot of scar tissue where he’d cut Jack Randall’s brand from his flesh.
“Well, so far, ye’ve clawed me, bitten me, stabbed me—more than once—and—”
“I have not stabbed you!”
“Ye did, too,” he informed me. “Ye stabbed me in the backside wi’ your nasty wee needle spikes—fifteen times! I counted—and then a dozen times or more in the leg with a rattlesnake’s fang.”
“I was saving your bloody life!”
“I didna say otherwise, did I? Ye’re no going to deny ye enjoyed it, though, are ye?”
“Well … not the rattlesnake fang, so much. As for the hypodermic …” My mouth twitched, despite myself. “You deserved it.”
He gave me a look of profound cynicism.
“Do nay harm, is it?”
“Besides, you were counting what I’d done to you in bed,” I said, neatly returning to the point. “You can’t count the shots.”
“I was in bed!”
“I wasn’t!”
“Aye, ye took unfair advantage,” he said, nodding. “I wouldna hold that against ye, though.”
He’d got my jacket off and was busily untying my laces, head bent in absorption.
“How’d you like it if I were jealous?” I asked the crown of his head.
“I’d like that fine,” he replied, breath warm on my exposed flesh. “And ye were. Of Laoghaire.” He looked up, grinning, eyebrow raised. “Maybe ye still are?”
I slapped him again, and this time I meant it. He could have stopped me but didn’t.
“Aye, that’s what I thought,” he said, wiping a watering eye. “Will ye come to bed wi’ me, then? It’ll be just us,” he added.
IT WAS LATE WHEN I woke; the room was dark, though a slice of fading sky showed at the top of the curtain. The fire hadn’t yet been lit and the room was chilly, but it was warm and cozy under the quilts, snug against Jamie’s body. He had turned onto his side, and I curled spoonlike against his back and put my arm over him, feeling the gentle rise and fall of his breath.
It had been just us. I’d worried, at the start, that the memory of Tom Christie and his awkward passion might fall between us—but Jamie, evidently thinking the same thing and determined to avoid any echo of Tom’s embrace that might remind me, had started at the other end, kissing my toes.
Given the size of the room and the fact that the bed was jammed tightly into one end of it, he had been obliged to straddle me in order to do this, and the combination of having my feet nibbled and the view from directly behind and beneath a naked Scotsman had been sufficient to remove anything else from my head.
Warm, safe, and calm now, I could think about the earlier encounter without feeling threatened, though. And I had felt threatened. Jamie had seen that. D’ye want me to tell you why ye slapped me? … I touched ye against your will.
He was right; it was one of the minor aftereffects of what had happened to me when I had been abducted. Crowds of men made me nervous with no cause, and being grabbed unexpectedly made me recoil and jerk away in panic. Why hadn’t I seen that?
/>
Because I didn’t want to think about it, that’s why. I still didn’t. What good would thinking do? Let things heal on their own, if they would.
But even things that heal leave scars. The evidence of that was literally in front of my face—pressed against it, in fact.
The scars on Jamie’s back had faded into a pale spiderweb, with only a slight raised bit here or there, ridged under my fingers when we made love, like barbed wire beneath his skin. I remembered Tom Christie taunting him about them once, and my jaw tightened.
I laid a hand softly on his back, tracing one pale loop with my thumb. He twitched in his sleep and I stilled, hand flat.
What might be coming? I wondered. For him. For me. I heard Tom Christie’s sarcastic voice: I have had enough of war. I am surprised that your husband has not.
“Well enough for you,” I muttered under my breath. “Coward.” Tom Christie had been imprisoned as a Jacobite—which he was, but not a soldier. He’d been a commissary supply officer in Charles Stuart’s army. He’d risked his wealth and his position—and lost both—but not his life or body.
Still, Jamie did respect him—which meant something, Jamie being no mean judge of character. And I knew enough from watching Roger to realize that becoming a clergyman was not the easy path that some people thought it. Roger was not a coward, either, and I wondered how he would find his path in the future?
I turned over, restless. Supper was being prepared; I could smell the rich, saltwater smell of fried oysters from the kitchen below, borne on a wave of woodsmoke and roasting potatoes.
Jamie stirred a little and rolled onto his back, but didn’t wake. Time enough. He was dreaming; I could see the movement of his eyes, twitching beneath sealed lids, and the momentary tightening of his lips.
His body tightened, too, suddenly hard beside me, and I jerked back, startled. He growled low in his throat, and his body arched with effort. He was making strangled noises, whether shouting or screaming in his dream I didn’t know, and didn’t wait to find out.
“Jamie—wake up!” I said sharply. I didn’t touch him—I knew better than to do that while he was in the grip of a violent dream; he’d nearly broken my nose once or twice. “Wake up!”
He gasped, caught his breath, and opened unfocused eyes. Plainly he didn’t know where he was, and I spoke to him more gently, repeating his name, reassuring him that he was all right. He blinked, swallowed heavily, then turned his head and saw me.
“Claire,” I said helpfully, seeing him groping for my name.
“Good,” he said hoarsely. He closed his eyes, shook his head, and then opened them again. “All right, Sassenach?”
“Yes. You?”
He nodded, closing his eyes again briefly.
“Aye, fine. I was dreaming about the house burning. Fighting.” He sniffed. “Is something burning?”
“Supper, at a guess.” The savory smells from below had in fact been interrupted by the acrid stench of smoke and scorched food. “I think the stewpot boiled over.”
“Perhaps we’ll eat elsewhere tonight.”
“Phaedre said Mrs. Symonds had baked ham with mustard and raisin sauce at noon. There might be some left. Are you all right?” I asked again. The room was cold, but his face and breast were sheened with sweat.
“Oh, aye,” he replied, sitting up and rubbing his hands vigorously through his hair. “That sort of dream, I can live with.” He shoved his hair out of his face and smiled at me. “Ye look like a milkweed puff, Sassenach. Were ye sleeping restless, too?”
“No,” I told him, getting up and pulling my shift on before groping for my hairbrush. “It was the restless part before we fell asleep. Or do you not remember that bit?”
He laughed, wiped his face, and got up to use the chamber pot, then pulled his shirt on.
“What about the other dreams?” I asked abruptly.
“What?” He emerged from the shirt, looking quizzical.
“You said, ‘That sort of dream, I can live with.’ What about the ones you can’t live with?”
I saw the lines of his face shiver like the surface of water when you’ve thrown a pebble into it, and on impulse, reached out and clutched his wrist.
“Don’t hide,” I said softly. I held his eyes with mine, keeping him from raising his mask. “Trust me.”
He did look away then, but only to gather himself; he didn’t hide. When he glanced back at me, it was all still there in his eyes—confusion, embarrassment, humiliation, and the vestiges of a pain long suppressed.
“I dream … sometimes …” he said haltingly, “about things that were done to me against my will.” He breathed through his nose, deep, exasperated. “And I wake from it with a cockstand and my balls throbbing and I want to go and kill someone, starting with myself,” he ended in a rush, grimacing.
“It doesna happen often,” he added, giving me a brief, direct look. “And I never … I would never turn to you in the wake of such a thing. Ye should know that.”
I tightened my grip on his wrist. I wanted to say, “You could—I wouldn’t mind,” for that was the truth, and once I would have said it without hesitation. But I knew a great deal more now, and had it been me, had I ever dreamed of Harley Boble or the heavy, soft-bodied man and wakened from it aroused—and thank God I never had—no, the last thing I would ever have done would be to take that feeling and turn to Jamie, or use his body to purge it.
“Thank you,” I said instead, quietly. “For telling me,” I added. “And for the knife.”
He nodded, and turned to pick up his breeks.
“I like ham,” he said.
I REGRET …
Long Island, colony of New York
September 1776
WILLIAM WISHED he could speak to his father. It wasn’t, he assured himself, that he wanted Lord John to exert any influence; certainly not. He just wanted a bit of practical advice. Lord John had returned to England, though, and William was on his own.
Well, not precisely on his own. He was at the moment in charge of a detachment of soldiers guarding a customs checkpoint on the edge of Long Island. He slapped viciously at a mosquito that lighted on his wrist, and, for once, obliterated it. He wished he could do the same to Clarewell.
Lieutenant Edward Markham, Marquis of Clarewell. Otherwise known—to William and a couple of his more intimate friends—as Chinless Ned, or the Ponce. William swatted at a crawling sensation on his own prominent jaw, noticed that two of his men had momentarily disappeared, and stalked toward the wagon they had been inspecting, bellowing their names.
Private Welch appeared from behind the wagon like a jack-in-the-box, looking startled and wiping his mouth. William leaned forward, sniffed his breath, and said briefly, “Charges. Where’s Launfal?”
In the wagon, hastily concluding a bargain with the wagon’s owner for three bottles of the contraband brandywine that gentleman was seeking to illicitly import. William, grimly slapping at the man-eating hordes of mosquitoes that swarmed out of the nearby marshes, arrested the wagoneer, summoned the other three men of his detail, and told them off to escort the smuggler, Welch, and Launfal to the sergeant. He took up a musket then and stood in the middle of the road, alone and ferocious, his attitude daring anyone to try to pass.
Ironically, though the road had been busy all morning, no one did try for some time, giving him opportunity to refocus his bad temper on the thought of Clarewell.
Heir of a very influential family, and one with intimate ties to Lord North, Chinless Ned had arrived in New York a week before William and likewise been placed on Howe’s staff, where he had nestled cozily into the woodwork, smarming round General Howe—who, to his credit, tended to blink and stare hard at the Ponce, as though trying to remember who the devil he was—and Captain Pickering, the general’s chief aide-de-camp, a vain man, and one much more susceptible to Ned’s enthusiastic arse-creeping.
As a result, Chinless had been routinely bagging the choicer assignments, riding with the general on
short exploratory expeditions, attending him in meetings with Indian dignitaries and the like, while William and several other junior officers were left to shuffle papers and kick their heels. Hard cheese, after the freedoms and excitements of intelligencing.
He could have stood the constraints of life in quarters and army bureaucracy. His father had schooled him thoroughly in the necessity of restraint in trying circumstances, the withstanding of boredom, the handling of dolts, and the art of icy politeness as a weapon. Someone lacking William’s strength of character, though, had snapped one day and, unable to resist the possibilities for caricature conjured up by a contemplation of Ned’s profile, had drawn a cartoon of Captain Pickering with his breeches round his ankles, engaged in lecturing the junior staff and apparently ignorant of the Ponce, emergent headfirst and smirking from Pickering’s arse.
William had not drawn this bit of diversion—though he rather wished he had—but had been discovered laughing at it by Ned himself, who—in a rare show of manliness—had punched William in the nose. The resultant brawl had cleared the junior officers’ quarters, broken a few inconsequent items of furniture, and resulted in William, dripping blood onto his shirtfront, standing to attention in front of a cold-eyed Captain Pickering, the scurrilous cartoon laid out in evidence on the desk.
William had, of course, denied authorship of the thing but declined to identify the artist. He’d used the icy-politeness thing, which had worked to the extent that Pickering had not in fact sent William to the stockade. Merely to Long Island.
“Frigging fart-catcher,” he muttered, glaring at an approaching milkmaid with such ferocity that she stopped dead, then edged past him, eyeing him with a wide-eyed alarm that suggested she thought he might explode. He bared his teeth at her, and she emitted a startled squeak and scuttled off so fast that some of her milk slopped out of the buckets she carried on a yoke across her shoulders.
That made him repentant; he wished he could follow her and apologize. But he couldn’t; a pair of drovers were coming down the road toward him, bringing in a herd of pigs. William took one look at the oncoming mass of heaving, squealing, spotted hog flesh, tatter-eared and mud-besmeared, and hopped nimbly up onto the bucket that served as his command post. The drovers waved gaily at him, shouting what might be either greetings or insults—he wasn’t sure they were even speaking English, and didn’t care to find out.
The pigs passed, leaving him amid a sea of hoof-churned mud, liberally scattered with fresh droppings. He slapped at the cloud of mosquitoes that had regathered inquisitively round his head, and thought that he’d had just about enough. He’d been on Long Island for two weeks—which was thirteen and a half days too long. Not quite long enough yet to make him apologize to either Chinless or the captain, though.
“Lickspittle,” he muttered.
He did have an alternative. And the longer he spent out here with the mosquitoes, the more attractive it began to look.
It was far too long a ride from his customs outpost to headquarters to make the journey twice each day. In consequence, he’d been temporarily billeted on a man called Culper and his two sisters. Culper wasn’t best pleased; his left eye began to twitch whenever he saw William, but the two elderly ladies made much of him, and he returned the favor when he could, bringing them the odd confiscated ham or flask of cambric. He’d come in the night before with a flitch of good bacon, to have Miss Abigail Culper inform him in a whisper that he had a visitor.
“Out a-smoking in the yard,” she’d said, inclining her bonneted head toward the side of the house. “Sister wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, I’m afraid.”
He’d expected to find one of his friends, come to bear him company or perhaps with news of an official pardon that would bring him back from exile on Long Island. Instead, he’d found Captain Richardson, pipe in hand, meditatively watching the Culpers’ rooster tread a hen.
“Pleasures of a bucolic life,” the captain remarked, as the rooster fell off backward. The cock staggered to his feet and crowed in disheveled triumph, while the hen shook her feathers into order and resumed pecking as though nothing had happened. “Very quiet out here, is it not?”
“Oh, yes,” William said. “Your servant, sir.”
In fact, it was not. Miss Beulah Culper kept a half-dozen goats, who blatted day and night, though Miss Beulah assured William that they served to keep thieves out of the corncrib. One of the creatures at this point gave a wild braying laugh from its pen, causing Captain Richardson to drop his tobacco pouch. Several more of the goats commenced to utter loud mehs, as though jeering.
William bent and picked the pouch up, keeping his face tactfully blank, though his heart was pounding. Richardson hadn’t come all the way out to Long Island simply to pass the time.
“Christ,” Richardson muttered, with a look at the goats. He shook his head,