8
MAN OF WORTH
“God, I hate boats!”
With this heart-felt valediction ringing in my ears, we swung slowly out into the waters of Wilmington harbor.
Two days of purchases and preparations found us now bound for Cross Creek. With money from the sale of the ruby in hand, there had been no need to sell the horses; Duncan had been sent with the wagon and the heavier goods, with Myers aboard to guide him, the rest of us to take a quicker, more comfortable passage with Captain Freeman, aboard the Sally Ann.
A craft of singular and indescribable type, the Sally Ann was square-beamed, long, low-sided, and blunt-prowed. She boasted a tiny cabin that measured roughly six feet square, leaving a scant two feet on either side for passage, and a somewhat greater area of deck fore and aft, this now partially obscured by bundles, bags, and barrels.
With a single sail mounted on a mast and boom above the cabin, the Sally Ann looked from a distance like a crab on a shingle, waving a flag of truce. The peaty brown waters of the Cape Fear lapped a scant four inches below the rail, and the boards of the bottom were perpetually damp with slow leakage.
Still, I was happy. Cramped conditions or no, it was good to be on the water, away—if only temporarily—from the Governor’s siren song.
Jamie wasn’t happy. He did indeed hate boats, with a profound and undying passion, and suffered from a seasickness so acute that watching the swirl of water in a glass could turn him green.
“It’s dead calm,” I observed. “Maybe you won’t be sick.”
Jamie squinted suspiciously at the chocolate-brown water around us, then clamped his eyes shut as the wake from another boat struck the Sally Ann broadside, rocking her violently.
“Maybe not,” he said, in tones indicating that while the suggestion was a hopeful one, he also thought the possibility remote.
“Do you want the needles? It’s better if I put them in before you vomit.” Resigned, I groped in the pocket of my skirt, where I had placed the small box containing the Chinese acupuncture needles that had saved his life on our Atlantic crossing.
He shuddered briefly and opened his eyes.
“No,” he said. “I’ll maybe do. Talk to me, Sassenach—take my mind off my stomach, aye?”
“All right,” I said obligingly. “What is your Aunt Jocasta like?”
“I havena seen her since I was two years old, so my impressions are a bit lacking,” he replied absently, eyes fixed on a large raft coming down the river, set on an apparent collision course with us. “D’ye think that Negro can manage? Perhaps I ought to give him a bit of help.”
“Perhaps you shouldn’t,” I said, eyeing the oncoming raft warily. “He seems to know what he’s doing.” Besides the captain—a disreputable old wreck who reeked of tobacco—theSally Ann had a single hand, an elderly black freedman who was dealing alone with the steerage of our craft, by means of a large pole.
The man’s lean muscles flexed and bulged in easy rhythm. Grizzled head bowed in effort, he took no apparent notice of the oncoming barge, but plunged and lifted in a liquid motion that made the long pole seem like a third limb.
“Let him alone. I suppose you don’t know much about your aunt, then?” I added, in hopes of distracting him. The raft was moving ponderously and inexorably toward us.
Some forty feet from end to end, it rode low in the water, weighed down with barrels and stacks of hides, tied down under netting. A pungent wave of odor preceded it, of musk and blood and rancid fat, strong enough to overpower temporarily all the other smells of the river.
“No; she wed the Cameron of Erracht and left Leoch the year before my mother married my father.” He spoke abstractedly, not looking at me; his attention was all on the oncoming barge. His knuckles whitened; I could feel his urge to leap forward, snatch the pole away from the deckhand, and stave off the raft. I laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“And she never came to visit at Lallybroch?”
I could see the gleam of sun on dull iron, where it struck cleats along the edge of the raft, and the half-naked forms of the three deckhands, sweating even in the early morning. One of them waved his hat and grinned, shouting something that sounded like, “Hah, you!” as they came on.
“Well, John Cameron died of a flux, and she wed his cousin, Black Hugh Cameron of Aberfeldy, and then—” He shut his eyes reflexively as the raft shot past, its hull no more than six inches from our own, amid a hail of good-natured jeers and shouts from its crew. Rollo, front paws perched on the low cabin roof, barked madly, until Ian cuffed him and told him to stop.
Jamie opened one eye, then seeing that the danger was past, opened the other and relaxed, letting go his grip on the roof.
“Aye, well, Black Hugh—they called him so for a great black wen on his knee—he was killed hunting, and so then she wed Hector Mor Cameron, of Loch Eilean—”
“She seems to have had quite a taste for Camerons,” I said, fascinated. “Is there something special about them as a clan—beyond being accident-prone, I mean?”
“They’ve a way wi’ words, I suppose,” he said, with a sudden wry grin. “The Camerons are poets—and jesters. Sometimes both. Ye’ll remember Lochiel, aye?”
I smiled, sharing his bittersweet recollection of Donald Cameron of Lochiel, one of the chiefs of clan Cameron at the time of the Rising. A handsome man with a soulful gaze, Lochiel’s gentle-eyed demeanor and elegant manners hid a truly great talent for the creation of vulgar doggerel, with which, sotto voce, he had not infrequently entertained me at balls in Edinburgh, during the brief heyday of Charles Stuart’s coup.
Jamie was leaning on the roof of the boat’s tiny cabin, watching the river traffic with a wary eye. We had not yet cleared Wilmington’s harbor, and small pirettas and sculls darted past like water bugs, whipping in and out between the larger, slower-moving craft. He was pale, but not green yet.
I leaned my elbows on the cabin roof as well, and stretched my back. Hot as it was, the heavy sunshine was comforting to the sore muscles caused by impromptu sleeping arrangements; I had spent the last night curled up on a hard oak settle in the taproom of a riverside tavern, sleeping with my head on Jamie’s knee as he completed the arrangements for our passage.
I groaned and stretched.
“Was Hector Cameron a poet, or a joker?”
“Neither one at the moment,” Jamie replied, automatically gripping the back of my neck and massaging it with one hand. “He’s dead, aye?”
“That’s wonderful,” I said, groaning with ecstasy as his thumb sank into a particularly tender spot. “What you’re doing, I mean, not that your uncle’s dead. Ooh, don’t stop. How did he get to North Carolina?”
Jamie snorted with amusement, and moved behind me so he could use both hands on my neck and shoulders. I nestled my bottom against him and sighed in bliss.
“You’re a verra noisy woman, Sassenach,” he said, leaning forward to whisper in my ear. “Ye make the same kind of sounds when I rub your neck as ye do when I—” He thrust his pelvis against me in a discreet but explicit motion that made it quite clear what he meant. “Mm?”
“Mmmm,” I replied, and kicked him—discreetly—in the shin. “Fine. If anyone hears me behind closed doors, they’ll assume you’re rubbing my neck—which is about all you’re likely to do until we get off this floating plank. Now, what about your late uncle?”
“Oh, him.” His fingers dug in on either side of my backbone, rubbing slowly up and down as he unraveled yet another strand in the tangled web of his family history. At least it was keeping his mind off his stomach.
Luckier—and either more perceptive or more cynical—than his famous kinsman, Hector Mor Cameron had cannily prepared himself against the eventuality of a Stuart disaster. He had escaped Culloden unwounded and made for home, where he had promptly loaded wife, servant, and portable assets into a coach, in which they fled to Edinburgh and thence by ship to North Carolina, narrowly escaping the Crown’s pursuit.
Once arrived in the New World, Hector had purchased a large tract of land, cleared the forest, built a house and a sawmill, bought slaves to work the place, planted his land in tobacco and indigo, and—no doubt worn out by so much industry—succumbed to the morbid sore throat at the ripe old age of seventy-three.
Having evidently decided that three times was enough, Jocasta MacKenzie Cameron Cameron Cameron had—so far as Myers knew—declined to wed again, but stayed on alone as mistress of River Run.
“Do you think the messenger with your letter will get there before we do?”
“He’d get there before we do if he crawled on his hands and knees,” Young Ian said, appearing suddenly beside us. He glanced in mild disgust at the patient deckhand, plunging and lifting his dripping pole. “It will be weeks before we get there, at this rate. I told ye it would have been best to ride, Uncle Jamie.”
“Dinna fret yourself, Ian,” his uncle assured him, letting go of my neck. He grinned at his nephew. “You’ll have a turn at the pole yourself before long—and I expect ye’ll have us in Cross Creek before nightfall, aye?”
Ian gave his uncle a dirty look and wandered off to pester Captain Freeman with questions about Red Indians and wild animals.
“I hope the Captain doesn’t put Ian overboard,” I said, observing Freeman’s scrawny shoulders draw defensively toward his ears as Ian approached. My own neck and shoulders glowed from the attention; so did portions further south. “Thanks for the rub,” I said, lifting one eyebrow at him.
“I’ll let ye return the favor, Sassenach—after dark.” He made an unsuccessful attempt at a leer. Unable to close one eye at a time, his ability to wink lewdly was substantially impaired, but he managed to convey his meaning nonetheless.
“Indeed,” I said. I fluttered my lashes at him. “And just what is it you’d like rubbed after dark?”
“After dark?” Ian asked, popping up again like a jack-in-the-box before his uncle could answer. “What happens after dark?”
“That’s when I drown ye and cut ye up for fish bait,” his uncle informed him. “God’s sake, can ye not settle, Ian? Ye’re bumpin’ about like a bumblebee in a bottle. Go and sleep in the sun, like your beast—there’s a sensible dog.” He nodded at Rollo, sprawled like a rug on the cabin roof with his eyes half-closed, twitching an occasional ear against the flies.
“Sleep?” Ian looked at his uncle in amazement. “Sleep?”
“It’s what normal people do when they’re tired,” I told him, stifling a yawn. The growing heat and the boat’s slow movement were highly soporific, after the short night—we had been up before dawn. Unfortunately, the narrow benches and rough deck planks of the Sally Ann didn’t look any more inviting than the tavern’s settle had been.
“Oh, I’m not a scrap tired, Auntie!” Ian assured me. “I dinna think I’ll sleep for days!”
Jamie eyed his nephew.
“We’ll see if ye still think so, after a turn at the pole. In the meantime, perhaps I can find something to occupy your mind. Wait a bit—” He broke off, and ducked into the low cabin, where I heard him rootling through the baggage.
“God, it’s hot!” said Ian, fanning himself. “What’s Uncle Jamie after, then?”
“God knows,” I said. Jamie had brought aboard a large crate, about the contents of which he had been most evasive. He had been playing cards when I had fallen asleep the night before, and my best guess was that he had acquired some embarrassing object in the course of gambling, which he was reluctant to expose to Ian’s teasing.
Ian was right; it was hot. I could only hope that there would be a breeze later; for the moment, the sail above hung limp as a dishcloth, and the fabric of my shift clung damp against my legs. With a murmured word to Ian, I edged past and sidled toward the bow, where the water barrel stood.
Fergus was standing in the prow, arms crossed, giving a splendid impression of a noble figurehead, with his sternly handsome profile pointed upriver, thick, dark hair flowing back from his brow.
“Ah, milady!” He greeted me with a sudden dazzle of white teeth. “Is this not a splendid country?”
What I could see at the moment was not particularly splendid, the landscape consisting of an extensive mudflat, reeking in the sun, and a large collection of gulls and seabirds, all raucously excited about something smelly they had found near the water’s edge.
“Milord tells me that any man may enter a claim for fifty acres of land, so long as he builds a house upon it, and promises to work it for a period of ten years. Imagine—fifty acres!” He rolled the words around in his mouth, savoring them with a kind of awe. A French peasant might think himself well blessed with five.
“Well, yes,” I said, a little doubtfully. “I think you ought to pick your fifty acres carefully, though. Some parts of this place aren’t much good for farming.” I didn’t hazard a guess as to how difficult Fergus might find it to carve a farm and homestead out of a howling wilderness with one hand, no matter how fertile the ground.
He wasn’t paying attention in any case, his eyes shiny with dreams.
“I might perhaps have a small house built by Hogmanay,” he murmured to himself. “Then I could send for Marsali and the child in the spring.” His hand went automatically to the vacant spot on his chest, where the greenish medal of St. Dismas had hung since his childhood.
He had come to join us in Georgia, leaving his young and pregnant wife behind in Jamaica, under the care of friends. He assured me that he had no fear for her safety, however, for he had left her also under the protection of his patron saint, with strict instructions not to remove the battered medal from around her neck until she was safely delivered.
I wouldn’t myself have thought that mothers and babies fell into the sphere of influence of the patron saint of thieves, but Fergus had lived as a pickpocket for all his early life, and his trust in Dismas was absolute.
“Will you call the baby Dismas, if it’s a boy?” I asked, joking.
“No,” he said in all seriousness. “I shall call him Germaine. Germaine James Ian Aloysius Fraser—James Ian for Milord and Monsieur,” he explained, for so he always referred to Jamie and his brother-in-law, Ian Murray.
“Marsali liked Aloysius,” he added dismissively, making it clear that he had had nothing to do with the choice of so undistinguished a name.
“And what if it’s a girl?” I asked, with a sudden vivid memory. Twenty-odd years before, Jamie had sent me back through the stones, pregnant. And the last thing he had said to me, convinced the child I carried was a boy, was, “Name him Brian, for my father.”
“Oh.” Fergus had clearly not considered this possibility, either, for he looked vaguely disconcerted. Then his features cleared.
“Genevieve,” he said firmly. “For Madame,” by this meaning Jenny Murray, Jamie’s sister. “Genevieve Claire, I think,” he added, with another dazzling smile.
“Oh,” I said, flustered and oddly flattered. “Well. Thank you. Are you sure that you ought not to go back to Jamaica to be with Marsali, Fergus?” I asked, changing the subject.
He shook his head decidedly.
“Milord may have need of me,” he said. “And I am of more use here than I should be there. Babies are women’s work, and who knows what dangers we may encounter in this strange place?”
As though in answer to this rhetorical question, the gulls rose in a squawking cloud, wheeling out over the river and mudflats, revealing the object of their appetite.
A stout pine stake had been driven into the mud of the bank, the top of it a foot below the dark, weedy line that marked the upper reaches of the incoming tide. The tide was still low; it had reached no higher than halfway up the stake. Above the lapping waves of silty water hung the figure of a man, fastened to the stake by a chain around his chest. Or what had once been his chest.
I couldn’t tell how long he had been there, but quite long enough, from the looks of him. A narrow gash of white showed the curve of skull where skin and hair had been stripped off. Impossible to say what he had looked like; the birds had been busy.
Beside me, Fergus said something very obscene in French, softly under his breath.
“Pirate,” said Captain Freeman laconically, coming up beside me and pausing long enough to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the river. “If they ain’t taken to Charleston for hangin’, sometimes they stake ’em out at low tide and let the river have ’em.”
“Are—are there a lot of them?” Ian had seen it, too; he was much too old to reach for my hand, but he stood close beside me, his face pale under its tan.
“Not so much, no more. The Navy does a good job keepin’ ’em down. But go back a few years, why, you could see four or five pirates out here at a time. Folk would pay to come out by boat, to sit and watch ’em drown. Real pretty out here when the tide comes in at sunset,” he said, jaws moving in a slow, nostalgic rhythm. “Turns the water red.”
“Look!” Ian, forgetting his dignity, clutched me by the arm. There was a movement near the riverbank, and we saw what had startled the birds away.
It slid into the water, a long, scaly form some five or six feet long, carving a deep groove in the soft mud of the bank. On the far side of the boat, the deckhand muttered something under his breath, but didn’t stop his poling.
“It is a crocodile,” Fergus said, and made the sign of the horns in distaste.
“No, I dinna think so.” Jamie spoke behind me, and I swung around to see him peering over the cabin roof, at the still figure in the water and the V-shaped wake moving toward it. He held a book in his hand, thumb between the pages to hold his place, and now bent his head to consult the volume.
“I believe it is an alligator. They dine upon carrion, it says here, and willna eat fresh meat. When they take a man or a sheep, they pull the victim beneath the water to drown it, but then drag it to their den below ground and leave it there until it has rotted enough to suit their fancy. Of course,” he added, with a bleak glance at the bank, “they’re sometimes fortunate enough to find a meal prepared.”
The figure on the stake seemed to tremble briefly, as something bumped it from below, and Ian made a small choking noise beside me.
“Where did you get that book?” I asked, not taking my eyes off the stake. The top of the wooden pole was vibrating, as though something under the waves was worrying at it. Then the pole was still, and the V-shaped wake could be seen again, traveling back toward the riverbank. I turned away before it could emerge.
Jamie handed me the book, his eyes still fixed on the black mudflat and its cloud of screeching birds.
“The Governor gave it to me. He said he thought it might be of interest on our journey.”
I glanced down at the book. Bound in plain buckram, the title was stamped on the spine in gold leaf—The Natural History of North Carolina.
“Eeugh!” said Ian beside me, watching the scene on shore in horror. “That’s the most awful thing I’ve ever—”
“Of interest,” I echoed, eyes fixed firmly on the book. “Yes, I expect it will be.”
Fergus, impervious to squeamishness of any kind, was watching the reptile’s progress up the mudbank with interest.
“An alligator, you say. Still, it is much the same thing as a crocodile, is it not?”
“Yes,” I said, shuddering despite the heat. I turned my back on the shore. I had met a crocodile at close range in the Indies, and wasn’t anxious to improve my acquaintance with any of its relatives.
Fergus wiped sweat from his upper lip, dark eyes intent on the gruesome thing.
“Dr. Stern once told Milord and myself about the travels of a Frenchman named Sonnini, who visited Egypt and wrote much of the sights he had witnessed and the customs he was told of. He said that in that country, the crocodiles copulate upon the muddy banks of the rivers, the female being laid upon her back, and in that position, incapable of rising without the assistance of the male.”
“Oh, aye?” Ian was all ears.
“Indeed. He said that some men there, hurried on by the impulses of depravity, would take advantage of this forced situation of the female, and hunt away the male, whereupon they would take his place and enjoy the inhuman embrace of the reptile, which is said to be a most powerful charm for the procurement of rank and riches.”
Ian’s mouth sagged open.
“You’re no serious, man?” he demanded of Fergus, incredulous. He turned to Jamie. “Uncle?”
Jamie shrugged, amused.
“I should rather live poor but virtuous, myself.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Besides, I think your auntie wouldna like it much if I was to forsake her embraces for a reptile’s.”
The black man, listening to this from his position in the bow, shook his head and spoke without looking round.
“Any man what gone frig with an alligator to get rich, he’s done earnt it, you ask me.”
“I rather think you’re right,” I said, with a vivid memory of the Governor’s charming, toothy smile. I glanced at Jamie, but he was no longer paying attention. His eyes were fixed upriver, intent on possibility, both book and alligator forgotten for the moment. At least he’d forgotten to be sick.
The tidal surge caught us a mile above Wilmington, allaying Ian’s fears for our speed. The Cape Fear was a tidal river, whose daily surge carried up two-thirds of its length, nearly as far as Cross Creek.
I felt the river quicken under us, the boat rising an inch or two, then beginning slowly to pick up speed as the power of the incoming tide was funneled up the harbor and into the river’s narrow channel. The slave sighed with relief and hoisted the dripping pole free of the water.
There would be no need for poling until the surge ran out, in five or six hours. Then we would either anchor for the night and catch the fresh surge of the next incoming tide, or use the sail for further progress, wind allowing. Poling, I was given to understand, was necessary only in case of sandbars or windless days.
A sense of peaceful somnolence settled over the craft. Fergus and Ian curled up in the bow to sleep, while Rollo kept guard on the roof above, tongue dripping as he panted, eyes half closed against the sun. The Captain and his hand—commonly addressed as “you, Troklus,” but whose name was actually Eutroclus—disappeared into the tiny cabin, from which I could hear the musical sound of liquid being poured.
Jamie was in the cabin, too, having gone to fetch something from his mysterious crate. I hoped it was drinkable; even sitting still on the stern transom with my feet dangling in the water, and with the small breeze of movement stirring the hair on my neck, I could feel sweat forming wherever skin touched skin.
There were indistinct murmurs in the cabin, and laughter. Jamie came out and turned toward the stern, stepping delicately through the piles of goods like a Clydesdale stallion in a field of frogs, a large wooden box held in his arms.
He set this gently on my lap, shucked off his shoes and stockings, and sat down beside me, putting his feet in the water with a sigh of pleasure at the coolness.
“What’s this?” I ran my hand curiously over the box.
“Oh, only a wee present.” He didn’t look at me, but the tips of his ears were pink. “Open it, hm?”
It was a heavy box, both wide and deep. Carved of a dense, fine-grained dark wood, it bore the marks of heavy use—nicks and dents that had seasoned but not impaired its polished beauty. It was hasped for a lock, but there was none; the lid rose easily on oiled brass hinges, and a whiff of camphor floated out, vaporous as a jinn.
The instruments gleamed under the smoky sun, bright despite a hazing of disuse. Each had its own pocket, carefully fitted and lined in green velvet.
A small, heavy-toothed saw; scissors, three scalpels—round-bladed, straight-bladed, scoop-bladed; the silver blade of a tongue depressor, a tenaculum …
“Jamie!” Delighted, I lifted out a short ebony rod, to the end of which was affixed a ball of worsted, wrapped in rather moth-eaten velvet. I’d seen one before, at Versailles; the eighteenth-century version of a reflex hammer. “Oh, Jamie! How wonderful!”
He wiggled his feet, pleased.
“Oh, ye like it?”
“I love it! Oh, look—there’s more in the lid, under this flap—” I stared for a moment at the disjointed tubes, screws, platforms and mirrors, until my mind’s eye shuffled them and presented me with the neatly assembled vision. “A microscope!” I touched it reverently. “My God, a microscope.”
“There’s more,” he pointed out, eager to show me. “The front opens and there are wee drawers inside.”
There were—containing, among other things, a miniature balance and set of brass weights, a tile for rolling pills, and a stained marble mortar, its pestle wrapped in cloth to prevent its being cracked in transit. Inside the front, above the drawers, were row upon row of small, corked bottles made of stone or glass.
“Oh, they’re beautiful!” I said, handling the small scalpel with reverence. The polished wood of the handle fit my hand as though it had been made for me, the blade weighted to an exquisite balance. “Oh, Jamie, thank you!”
“Ye like them, then?” His ears had gone bright red with pleasure. “I thought they’d maybe do. I’ve no notion what they’re meant for, but I could see they were finely made.”
I had no notion what some of the pieces were meant for, but all of them were beautiful in themselves; made by or for a man who loved his tools and what they did.
“Who did they belong to, I wonder?” I breathed heavily on the rounded surface of a lenticular and brought it to a soft gleam with a fold of my skirt.
“The woman who sold it to me didna ken; he left behind his doctor’s book, though, and I took that, as well—perhaps it will give his name.”
Lifting the top tray of instruments, he revealed another, shallower tray, from which he drew out a fat square-bound book, some eight inches wide, covered in scuffed black leather.
“I thought ye might be wanting a book, too, like the one ye kept in France,” he explained. “The one where ye kept the pictures and the notes of the people ye saw at L’Hôpital. He’s written a bit in this one, but there’s a deal of blank pages left at the back.”
Perhaps a quarter of the book had been used; the pages were covered with a closely written, fine black script, interspersed with drawings that took my eye with their clinical familiarity: an ulcerated toe, a shattered kneecap, the skin neatly peeled aside; the grotesque swelling of advanced goiter, and a dissection of the calf muscles, each neatly labeled.
I turned back to the inside cover; sure enough, his name was written on the first page, adorned with a small, gentlemanly flourish: Dr. Daniel Rawlings, Esq.
“What happened to Dr. Rawlings, I wonder? Did the woman who had the box say?”
Jamie nodded, his brow slightly creased.
“The Doctor lodged with her for a night. He said he’d come from Virginia, where his home was, bound upon some errand, and his case with him. He was looking for a man named Garver—she thought that was the name, at least. But that night after supper he went out—and never came back.”
I stared at him.
“Never came back? Did she find out what happened to him?”
Jamie shook his head, batting away a small cloud of midges. The sun was sinking, painting the surface of the water gold and orange, and bugs were beginning to gather as the afternoon cooled into evening.
“No. She went to the sheriff, and to the justice, and the constable searched high and low—but there was nay sign of the man. They looked for a week, and then gave up. He had never told his landlady which town it was in Virginia, so they couldna trace him further.”
“How very odd.” I wiped a droplet of moisture off my chin. “When did the Doctor disappear?”
“A year past, she said.” He looked at me, a little anxious. “Ye dinna mind? Using his things, I mean?”
“No.” I closed the lid and stroked it gently, the dark wood warm and smooth under my fingers. “If it were me—I’d want someone to use them.”
I remembered vividly the feel of my own doctor’s bag—cordovan leather, with my initials stamped in gilt on the handle. Originally stamped in gilt on the handle, that is; they had long since worn off, the leather gone smooth and shiny, rich with handling. Frank had given me the bag when I graduated from medical school; I had given it to my friend Joe Abernathy, wanting it to be used by someone who would treasure it as I had.
He saw the shadow drift across my face—I saw the reflection of it darken his—but I took his hand and smiled as I squeezed it.
“It’s a wonderful gift. However did you find it?”
He smiled then, in return. The sun blazed low, a brilliant orange ball glimpsed briefly through dark treetops.
“I’d seen the box when I went to the goldsmith’s shop—it was the goldsmith’s wife who’d kept it. Then I went back yesterday, meaning to buy ye a bit of jewelry—maybe a brooch—and whilst the goodwife was showing me the gauds, we happened to speak of this and that, and she told me of the Doctor, and—” He shrugged.
“Why did you want to buy me jewelry?” I looked at him, puzzled. The sale of the ruby had left us with a bit of money, but extravagance was not at all like him, and under the circumstances—
“Oh! To make up for sending all that money to Laoghaire? I didn’t mind; I said I didn’t.”
He had—with some reluctance—arranged to send the bulk of the proceeds from the sale of the stone to Scotland, in payment of a promise made to Laoghaire MacKenzie—damn her eyes—Fraser, whom he had married at his sister’s persuasion while under the rather logical impression that if I was not dead, I was at least not coming back. My apparent resurrection from the dead had caused any amount of complications, Laoghaire not least among them.
“Aye, ye said so,” he said, openly cynical.
“I meant it—more or less,” I said, and laughed. “You couldn’t very well let the beastly woman starve to death, appealing as the idea is.”
He smiled, faintly.
“No. I shouldna like to have that on my conscience; there’s enough without. But that’s not why I wished to buy ye a present.”
“Why, then?” The box was heavy; a gracious, substantial, satisfying weight across my legs, its wood a delight under my hands. He turned his head to look full at me, then, his hair fire-struck with the setting sun, face dark in silhouette.
“Twenty-four years ago today, I married ye, Sassenach,” he said softly. “I hope ye willna have cause yet to regret it.”
The river’s edge was settled, rimmed with plantations from Wilmington to Cross Creek. Still, the banks were thickly forested, with only the occasional glimpse of fields where a break in the trees showed plantings, or every so often, a wooden dock, half-hidden in the foliage.
We proceeded slowly upriver, following the tidal surge so long as it lasted, tying up for the night when it ran out. We ate dinner by a small fire on shore, but slept on the boat, Eutroclus having casually mentioned the prevalence of water moccasins, who—he said—inhabited dens beneath the riverbank but were much inclined to come and warm their cold blood next to the bodies of unwary sleepers.
I awoke soon before dawn, stiff and sore from sleeping on boards, hearing the soft rush of a vessel passing on the river nearby, feeling the push of its wake against our hull. Jamie stirred in his sleep when he felt me move, turned over, and clasped me to his bosom.
I could feel his body curled behind mine, in its paradoxical morning state of sleep and arousal. He made a drowsy noise and moved against me in inquiry, his hand fumbling at the hem of my rumpled shift.
“Stop,” I said under my breath, batting his hand away. “Remember where we are, for God’s sake!”
I could hear the shouts and barking of Ian and Rollo, galumphing to and fro on the shore, and small stirrings in the cabin, featuring hawking and spitting noises, indicating the imminent emergence of Captain Freeman.
“Oh,” said Jamie, coming to the surface of consciousness. “Oh, aye. A pity, that.” He reached up, squeezed my breasts with both hands, and stretched his body with voluptuous slowness against me, giving me a detailed idea of what I was missing.
“Ah, well,” he said, relaxing reluctantly, but not yet letting go. “Foeda est in coitu, um?”
“It what?”
“ ‘Foeda est in coitu et breois voluptas’ ” he recited obligingly. “ ‘Et taedat Veneiis statim peractae. Doing, a filthy pleasure is—and short. And done, we straight repent us of the sport.’ ”
I glanced down at the stained boards under us. “Well, perhaps ‘filthy’ isn’t altogether the wrong word,” I began, “but—”
“It’s not the filthiness that troubles me, Sassenach,” he interrupted, scowling at Ian, who was hanging over the side of the boat, shouting encouragement to Rollo as he swam. “It’s the short.”
He glanced at me, scowl changing to a look of approval as he took in my state of dishevelment. “I mean to take my time about it, aye?”
This classical start to the day seemed to have had some lasting influence on Jamie’s mind. I could hear them at it as I sat in the afternoon sun, thumbing through Daniel Rawlings’s casebook—at once entertained, enlightened, and appalled at the things recorded there.
I could hear Jamie’s voice in the ordered rise and fall of ancient Greek. I had heard that bit before—a passage from the Odyssey. He paused, with an expectant rise.
“Ah …” said Ian.
“What comes next, Ian?”
“Er …”
“Once more,” said Jamie, with a slight edge to his voice. “Pay attention, man. I’m no talkin’ for the pleasure of hearin’ myself, aye?” He began again, the elegant, formal verse warming to life as he spoke.
He might not take pleasure in hearing himself, but I did. I had no Greek myself, but the rise and fall of syllables in that soft, deep voice was as soothing as the lap of water against the hull.
Reluctantly accepting his nephew’s continued presence, Jamie took his guardianship of Ian with due seriousness, and had been tutoring the lad as we traveled, seizing odd moments of leisure to teach—or attempt to teach—the lad the rudiments of Greek and Latin grammar, and to improve his mathematics and conversational French.
Fortunately, Ian had the same quick grasp of mathematical principles as his uncle; the side of the small cabin beside me was covered with elegant Euclidean proofs, carried out in burnt stick. When the subject turned to languages, though, they found less common ground.
Jamie was a natural polygogue; he acquired languages and dialects with no visible effort, picking up idioms as a dog picks up foxtails in a romp through the fields. In addition, he had been schooled in the Classics at the Université in Paris, and—while disagreeing now and then with some of the Roman philosophers—regarded both Homer and Virgil as personal friends.
Ian spoke the Gaelic and English with which he had been raised, and a sort of low French patois acquired from Fergus, and felt this quite sufficient to his needs. True, he had an impressive repertoire of swear words in six or seven other languages—acquired from exposure to a number of disreputable influences in the recent past, not least of these being his uncle—but he had no more than a vague apprehension of the mysteries of Latin conjugation.
Still less did he have an appreciation for the necessity of learning languages that to him were not only dead, but—he clearly thought—long decayed beyond any possibility of usefulness. Homer couldn’t compete with the excitement of this new country, adventure reaching out from both shores with beckoning green hands.
Jamie finished his Greek passage, and with a sigh clearly audible to me where I sat, directed Ian to take out the Latin book he had borrowed from Governor Tryon’s library. With no recitation to distract me, I returned to my perusal of Dr. Rawlings’s casebook.
Like myself, the Doctor had plainly had some Latin, but preferred English for the bulk of his notes, dropping into Latin only for an occasional formal entry.
Bled Mr. Beddoes of a pt. Note distinct lessening of the bilious humor, his complexion much improved of the yellowness and pustules which have afflicted him. Administered black draught to assist purifying of the blood.
“Ass,” I muttered—not for the first time. “Can’t you see the man’s got liver disease?” Probably a mild cirrhosis; Rawlings had noted a slight enlargement and hardening of the liver—though he attributed this to excessive production of bile. Most likely alcohol poisoning; the pustules on face and chest were characteristic of a nutritional deficiency that I saw commonly associated with excessive alcohol consumption—and God knew, that was epidemic.
Beddoes, if he were still alive—a prospect I considered doubtful—was likely drinking anything up to a quart of mixed spirit daily and hadn’t so much as smelled a green vegetable in months. The pustules on whose disappearance Rawlings was congratulating himself had likely diminished because he had used turnip leaves as a coloring agent in his special receipt for “black draught.”
Absorbed in my reading, I half heard Ian’s stumbling rendition of Plautus’s Vertue from the other side of the cabin, interrupted in every other line by Jamie’s deeper voice, prompting and correcting.
“ ‘Virtus praemium est optimus …’ ”
“Optimum.”
“ ‘… est optimum. Virtus omnibus rebus’ and … ah … and …”
“Anteit.”
“Thank ye, Uncle. ‘Virtus omnibus rebus anteit … profectus’?”
“Profecto.”
“Oh, aye, profecto. Um … ‘Virtus’?”
“Libertas. ‘Libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati …’ d’ye recall what is meant by ‘vita,’ Ian?”
“Life,” came Ian’s voice, seizing gratefully on this buoyant object in a flounderous sea.
“Aye, that’s good, but it’s more than life. In Latin, it means not only being alive but it’s also a man’s substance, what he’s made of. See, then it goes on, ‘… libertas salus vita res et parentes, patria et prognati tutantur, servantur; virtus omnia in sese habet, omnia adsunt bona quem penest virtus.’ Now, what is he sayin’ there, d’ye think?”
“Ah … virtue is a good thing?” Ian ventured.
There was a momentary silence, during which I could almost hear Jamie’s blood pressure rising. A hiss of indrawn breath, then, as he thought better of whatever he had been about to say, a long-suffering exhalation.
“Mmphm. Look ye, Ian. ‘Tutantur, servantur.’ What does he mean by using those two together, instead of putting it as …” My attention faded, drawn back to the book, wherein Dr. Rawlings now gave account of a duel and its consequences.
May 15. Was called from my bed at dawn to attend a gentleman staying at the Red Dog. Found him in sad case, with a wound to his hand, occasioned by the misfire of a pistol, the thumb and index fingers of the hand being blown off altogether by the explosion, the middle finger badly mangled and two-thirds of the hand so lacerated that it was scarce recognizable as a human appendage.
Determining that only prompt amputation would serve, I sent for the landlord and requested a pannikin of brandy, linen for bandages, and the help of two strong men. These being rapidly provided and the patient suitably restrained, I proceeded to take the hand—it was the right, to the misfortune of the patient—off just above the wrist. Successfully ligated two arteries, but the anterior interosseus escaped me, being retracted into the flesh after I sawed through the bones. Was forced to loosen the tourniquet in order to find it, so bleeding was considerable—a fortunate accident, as the copious outpouring of blood rendered the patient insensible and thus put an end for the moment to his agony, as well as to his struggles, which were greatly hampering my work.
The amputation being successfully concluded, the gentleman was put to bed, but I stayed near at hand, lest he regain consciousness abruptly and in random movement do hurt to my stitching.
This fascinating narrative was interrupted by a sudden outburst from Jamie, who had evidently reached the end of his patience.
“Ian, your Latin would disgrace a dog! And as for the rest, ye havena got enough understanding of Greek to tell the difference between water and wine!”
“If they’re drinkin’ it, it’s not water,” Ian muttered, sounding rebellious.
I closed the book and got hastily to my feet. It sounded rather as though the services of a referee might shortly be called for. Ian was making small Scottish noises of discontent as I rounded the cabin.
“Aye, mphm, but I dinna care so much—”
“Aye, ye don’t care! That’s the true pity of it—that ye havena the grace even to feel shame for your ignorance!”
There was a charged silence after this, broken only by the soft splash of Troklus’s pole in the bow. I peeked around the corner, to see Jamie glaring at his nephew, who looked abashed. Ian glanced at me, coughed and cleared his throat.
“Well, I’ll tell ye, Uncle Jamie, if I thought shame would help, I wouldna scruple to blush.”
He looked so apologetically hangdog that I couldn’t help laughing. Jamie turned, hearing me, and his scowl faded slightly.
“Ye’re not a bit of help, Sassenach,” he said. “You’ve the Latin, have ye not? Being a physician, ye must. Perhaps I should leave his Latin schooling to you, aye?”
I shook my head. While it was more or less true that I could read Latin—badly and laboriously—I didn’t fancy trying to cram the ragbag remnants of my education into Ian’s head.
“All I remember is Arma virumque cano.” I glanced at Ian and translated, grinning. “My arm got bit off by a dog.”
Ian burst into giggles, and Jamie gave me a look of profound disillusion.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. While Jamie and Ian didn’t resemble each other in any physical respect beyond height, both had thick hair and the habit of running a hand through it when agitated or thoughtful. It looked to have been a stressful lesson—both of them looked as though they’d been pulled backward through a hedgerow.
Jamie smiled wryly at me, then turned back to Ian, shaking his head.
“Ah, well. I’m sorry to bark at ye, Ian, truly. But ye’ve a fine mind, and I shouldna like to see ye waste it. God, man, at your age, I was in Paris, already starting in to study at the Université!”
Ian stood looking down into the water that swirled past the side of the ship in smooth brown riffles. His hands rested on the rail; big hands, broad-backed and browned by the sun.
“Aye,” he said. “And at my age, my own father was in France, too. Fighting.”
I was a bit startled to hear this. I had known that the elder Ian had soldiered in France for a time, but not that he had gone so early for a soldier—nor stayed so long. Young Ian was just fifteen. The elder Ian had served as a foreign mercenary from that age, then, until the age of twenty-two; when a cannon blast had left him with a leg so badly shattered by grapeshot that it had been amputated just below the knee—and he had come home for good.
Jamie looked at his nephew for a moment, frowning slightly. Then he came to stand beside Ian, leaning backward, hands on the rail to balance himself.
“I ken that, aye?” Jamie said quietly. “For I followed him, four years later, when I was outlawed.”
Ian looked up at that, startled.
“Ye were together there in France?”
There was a slight breeze caused by our movement, but it was still a hot day. Perhaps the temperature decided him that it was better to let the subject of higher learning drop for a moment, for Jamie nodded, lifting the thick tail of his hair to cool his neck.
“In Flanders. For more than a year, before Ian was wounded and sent home. We fought wi’ a regiment of Scots mercenaries then—under Fergus mac Leodhas.”
Ian’s eyes were alight with interest.
“Is that where Fergus—our Fergus—got his name, then?”
His uncle smiled.
“Aye, I named him for mac Leodhas; a bonny man, and a great soldier, forbye. He thought weel o’ Ian. Did your Da never speak to you of him?”
Ian shook his head, his brow slightly clouded.
“He’s never said a thing to me. I—I kent he’d lost his leg fighting in France—Mam told me that, when I asked—but he wouldna say a word about it, himself.”
With Dr. Rawlings’s description of amputation vivid in my mind, I thought it likely that the elder Ian hadn’t wanted to recall the occasion.
Jamie shrugged, plucking the sweat-damp shirt away from his chest.
“Aye, well. I suppose he meant to put that time behind him, once he’d come home and settled at Lallybroch. And then …” He hesitated, but Ian was insistent.
“And then what, Uncle Jamie?”
Jamie glanced at his nephew, and one side of his mouth curled up.
“Well, I think he didna want to tell too many tales of war and fighting, lest you lads get thinking on it and set yourselves to go for soldiers, too. He and your mother will ha’ wanted better for you, aye?”
I thought the elder Ian had been wise; it was clear from the look on his face that the younger Ian couldn’t think of a much more exciting prospect than war and fighting.
“That will ha’ been my Mam’s doing,” Ian said, with an air of disgust. “She’d have me wrapped in wool and tied to her apron strings, did I let her.”
Jamie grinned.
“Oh, let her, is it? And d’ye think she’d wrap ye in wool and smother ye wi’ kisses if ye were home this minute?”
Ian dropped the pose of disdain.
“Well, no,” he admitted. “I think she’d skelp me raw.”
Jamie laughed.
“Ye know a bit about women, Ian, if not so much as ye think.”
Ian glanced skeptically from his uncle to me, and back.
“And you’ll ken all about them, I suppose, Uncle?”
I raised one eyebrow, inviting an answer to this, but Jamie merely laughed.
“It’s a wise man who kens the limits of his knowledge, Ian.” He bent and kissed my damp forehead, then turned back to his nephew, adding, “Though I could wish your own limits went a bit further.”
Ian shrugged, looking bored.
“I dinna mean to set up for a gentleman,” he said. “After all, Young Jamie and Michael dinna read Greek; they do well enough!”
Jamie rubbed his nose, considering his nephew thoughtfully.
“Young Jamie has Lallybroch. And wee Michael does well wi’ Jared in Paris. They’ll be settled. We did as best we might for the two o’ them, but there was precious little money to pay for travel or schooling when they came to manhood. There wasna much choice for them, aye?”
He pushed himself off the rail and stood upright.
“But your parents dinna want that for you, Ian, if better might be managed. They’d have ye grow to be a man of learning and influence; duine uasal, perhaps.” It was a Gaelic expression I had heard before, literally “a man of worth.” It was the term for tacksmen and lairds, the men of property and followers who ranked only below chieftains in the Highland clans.
Such a man as Jamie himself had been, before the Rising. But not now.
“Mmphm. And did ye do as your parents wanted for ye, then, Uncle Jamie?” Ian looked blandly at his uncle, with only a wary twitch of the eye to show he knew he was treading on shaky ground. Jamie had been meant to be duine uasal, indeed; Lallybroch had been his by right. It was only in an effort to save the property from confiscation by the Crown that he had made it over legally to Young Jamie, instead.
Jamie stared at him for a moment, then rubbed a knuckle across his upper lip before replying.
“I did say ye’d a fine mind, no?” he answered dryly. “Though since ye ask … I was raised to do two things, Ian. To mind my land and people, and to care for my family. I’ve done those two things, as best I might—and I shall go on doing them as best I can.”
Young Ian had the grace to look abashed at this.
“Aye, well, I didna mean …” he mumbled, looking at his feet.
“Dinna fash, laddie,” Jamie interrupted, clapping him on the shoulder. He grinned wryly at his nephew. “Ye’ll amount to something for your mother’s sake—if it kills us both. And now I think it will be my turn at the pole.”
He glanced forward, to where Troklus’s shoulders gleamed like oily copper, snake-muscled with long labor. Jamie untied his breeches—unlike the other men, he would not take off his shirt for poling, but stripped his breeks for coolness and worked with his shirt knotted between his thighs, in the Highland style—and nodded to Ian.
“You think about it, laddie. Youngest son or no, your life’s not meant to be wasted.”
He smiled at me then, with a sudden heart-stopping brilliance, and handed me his shed breeks. Then, still holding my hand in his, he stood upright and, hand over heart, declaimed,
“Amo, amas, I love a lass,
As cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip’s grace
Is her nominative case,
And she’s o’ the feminine gender.”
He nodded graciously to Ian, who had dissolved in giggles, and lifted my hand to his lips, blue eyes aslant with mischief.
“Can I decline a nymph so divine?
Her voice like a flute is dulcis;
Her oculus bright, her manus white
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.
O bow belle, my puella
I’ll kiss in secula seculorum;
If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.”
He made a courtly leg to me, blinked solemnly in his version of a wink, and strode off in his shirt.