121

ACROSS THE ABYSS

Three nights later, I woke from a restless sleep in an inn in Wilmington, my throat parched as the salt bacon I had eaten in the dinner stew. Sitting up to find water, I found that I was alone—the moonlight through the window shone white on the vacant pillow beside me.

I found Jamie outside, behind the inn, his nightshirt a pale blotch in the darkness of the innyard. He was sitting on the ground with his back against a chopping block, arms wrapped about his knees.

He didn’t speak as I came toward him, but turned his head, body shifting in a silent welcome. I sat down on the chopping block behind him, and he leaned his head back against my thigh, with a long, deep sigh.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I touched him gently, smoothing back the hair from his face. He slept with it unbound, and it fell thick and wild about his shoulders, tangled from bed.

“Nay, I slept,” he said quietly. His eyes were open, looking up at the great gold moon, three-quarters full over the aspens near the inn. “I had a dream.”

“A nightmare?” He had them seldom anymore, but they did come sometimes: the bloody memories of Culloden, of futile death and slaughter; prison dreams of hunger and confinement—and sometimes, very rarely, Jack Randall returned to him in sleep, with loving cruelty. Such dreams would always drive him from his bed to walk to and fro for hours, until exhaustion cleansed him of their visions. But he had not dreamed that way since Moore’s Creek Bridge.

“No,” he said, sounding half-surprised. “Not at all. I dreamed of her—of our lassie—and the bairns.”

My heart gave an odd little hop, the consequence of startlement and what might almost have been envy.

“You dreamed about Brianna and the children? What happened?”

He smiled, face tranquil and abstracted in the moonlight, as though he still saw some part of the dream before him.

“It is all right,” he said. “They are safe. I saw them in a town—it seemed like Inverness, but it was different, somehow. They walked up the step of a house—Roger Mac was with them,” he added, offhand. “They knocked at the door, and a wee brown-haired woman opened to them. She laughed wi’ joy to see them, and brought them in, and they went down a hallway, wi’ strange things like bowls hanging from the ceiling.

“Then they were in a room, wi’ sofas and chairs, and the room had great windows all down one wall, from the floor to the ceiling, and the afternoon sun was streaming in, setting Brianna’s hair to fire, and makin’ wee Mandy cry when it got in her eyes.”

“Did … did any of them call the brown-haired woman by name?” I asked, my heart beating in a queer, fast way.

He frowned, moonlight making a cross of light over nose and brows.

“Aye, they did,” he said. “I canna just—oh, aye; Roger Mac called her Fiona.”

“Did he?” I said. My hands rested on his shoulder, and my mouth was a hundred times drier than it had been when I woke up. The night was chilly, but not enough to account for the temperature of my hands.

I had told Jamie any amount of things about my own time over the years of our marriage. About trains and planes and automobiles and wars and indoor plumbing. But I was nearly sure that I had never told him what the study looked like in the manse where Roger had grown up with his adoptive father.

The room with the window wall, made to accommodate the Reverend’s painting hobby. The manse with its long hallway, furnished with old-fashioned light fixtures, shaped like hanging bowls. And I knew I had never told him about the Reverend’s last housekeeper, a girl with dark, curly hair, called Fiona.

“Were they happy?” I asked at last, very quietly.

“Aye. Brianna and the lad—they had some shadows to their faces, but I could see they were glad nonetheless. They all sat down to eat—Brianna and her lad close together, leaning on each other—and wee Jem stuffed his face wi’ cakes and cream.” He smiled at the picture, teeth a brief gleam in the darkness.

“Oh—at the last, just before I woke … wee Jem was messin’ about, picking things up and putting them down as he does. There was a … thing . . on the table. I couldna say what it was; I’ve never seen the like.”

He held his hands about six inches apart, frowning at them. “It was maybe this wide, and just a bit longer—something like a box, maybe, only sort of … humped.”

“Humped?” I said, puzzled as to what this could be.

“Aye, and it had a thing on top like a wee club, only wi’ a knob to each end, and the club was tied to the box wi’ a sort of black cord, curled up on itself like a piggie’s tail. Jem saw it, and he reached out his hand, and said, ‘I want to talk to Grandda.’ And then I woke.”

He leaned his head back farther, so as to look up into my face.

“Would ye ken what a thing like that might be, Sassenach? It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

The autumn wind came rustling down from the hill, dry leaves hurrying in its wake, quick and light as the footsteps of a ghost, and I felt the hair rise on nape and forearms.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve told you about them, I know.” I didn’t think, though, that I had ever described one to him, in more than general terms. I cleared my throat.

“It’s called a telephone.”