An Echo in the Bone (138 page)

“Of course I would,” Jamie said logically. “Jenny would tell me. And ye dinna mean to suggest she wouldna ken if ye had a mistress and six bastard bairns, or ye’d taken to the highways and been robbing folk in a black silk mask?”

“Well, possibly she would,” Ian admitted. “Though come on, man, there’s nothing ye could call a highway within a hundred miles. And I’d freeze to death long before I came across anyone worth robbin’ in one o’ the passes.” He paused, eyes narrowed against the wind, contemplating the criminal possibilities open to him.

“I could ha’ been stealing cattle,” he offered. “Though there’re sae few beasts these days, the whole parish would ken it at once should one go missing. And I doubt I could hide it amongst Jenny’s sheep wi’ any hope of its not bein’ noticed.”

He thought further, chin in hand, then reluctantly shook his head.

“The sad truth is, Jamie, no one’s had a thing worth stealin’ in the Highlands these twenty years past. Nay, theft’s right out, I’m afraid. So is fornication, because Jenny would ha’ killed me already. What does that leave? There’s no really anything to covet…. I suppose lying and murder is all that’s left, and while I’ve met the odd man I would ha’
liked
to kill, I never did.” He shook his head regretfully, and Jamie laughed.

“Oh, aye? Ye told me ye killed men in France.”

“Well, aye, I did, but that was a matter of war—or business,” he added fairly. “I was bein’ paid to kill them; I didna do it out o’ spite.”

“Well, then, I’m right,” Jamie pointed out. “Ye’ll sail straight through purgatory like a rising cloud, for I canna think of a single lie ye’ve ever told me.”

Ian smiled with great affection.

“Aye, well, I may ha’ told lies now and then, Jamie—but no, not to you.”

He looked down at the worn wooden peg stretched before him and scratched at the knee on that side.

“I wonder, will it feel different?”

“How could it not?”

“Well, the thing is,” Ian said, wiggling his sound foot to and fro, “I can still feel my missing foot.

Always have been able to, ever since it went. Not all the time, mind,” he added, looking up. “But I do feel it. A verra strange thing. Do ye feel your finger?” he asked curiously, raising his chin at Jamie’s right hand.

“Well… aye, I do. Not all the time, but now and then—and the nasty thing is that even though it’s gone, it still
hurts
like damnation, which doesna seem really fair.”

He could have bitten his tongue at that, for here Ian was dying, and him complaining that the loss of his finger wasn’t fair. Ian wheezed with amusement, though, and leaned back, shaking his head.

“If life was fair, then what?”

They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the wind move through the pines on the hillside opposite. Then Jamie reached into his sporran and brought out the tiny white-wrapped package. It was a bit grubby from being in his sporran but had been tidily preserved and tightly wrapped.

Ian eyed the little bundle in his palm.

“What’s this?”

“My finger,” Jamie said. “I—well… I wondered whether ye’d maybe not mind to have it buried with ye.”

Ian looked at him for a moment. Then his shoulders started to shake.

“God, don’t laugh!” Jamie said, alarmed. “I didna mean to make ye laugh! Christ, Jenny will kill me if ye cough up a lung and die out here!”

Ian
was
coughing, fits of it interspersed with long-drawn-out wheezes of laughter. Tears of mirth stood in his eyes, and he pressed both fists into his chest, struggling to breathe. At last, though, he left off and straightened slowly up, making a sound like a bellows. He sniffed deep and casually spat a glob of horrifying scarlet into the rocks.

“I’d rather die out here laughin’ at you than in my bed wi’ six priests say-in’ prayers,” he said.

“Doubt I’ll get the chance, though.” He put out a hand, palm up. “Aye, give it here.”

Jamie laid the little white-wrapped cylinder in his hand, and Ian tucked the finger casually into his own sporran.

“I’ll keep it safe ’til ye catch me up.”

HE CAME DOWN through the trees and made his way toward the edge of the moorland that lay below the cave. It was sharply cold, with a stiff breeze blowing, and the light changed over the land like the flicker of a bird’s wings as the clouds slid overhead, long and fleeting. He’d picked up a deer trail through the heather earlier in the morning, but it had disappeared in a stony fall near a brae, and now he was coming back toward the house; he was behind the hill on which the broch stood, this side of it thick with a little wood of beech and pine. He’d not seen a deer or even a coney this morning, but wasn’t bothered.

With so many in the house, they could use a deer, to be sure—but he was happy only to be out of the house, even if he came back with nothing.

He couldn’t look at Ian without wanting to stare at his face, to commit him to memory, to impress these last bits of his brother-in-law upon his mind in the way that he recalled special vivid moments, there to be taken out and lived through again at need. But at the same time, he didn’t
want to
remember Ian as he was now; much better to keep what he had of him: firelight on the side of Ian’s face, laughing fit to burst as he’d forced Jamie’s arm over in a wrestling match, his own wiry strength surprising them both. Ian’s long, knob-jointed hands on the gralloch knife, the wrench and the hot metal smell of the blood that smeared his fingers, the look of his brown hair ruffling in the wind off the loch, the narrow back, bent and springy as a bow as he stooped to snatch one of his toddling bairns or grandchildren off their feet and throw them up giggling into the air.

It was good they’d come, he thought. Better than good that they’d brought the lad back in time to speak to his father as a man, to comfort Ian’s mind and take his leave properly. But to live in the same house with a beloved brother dying by inches under your nose wore sadly on the nerves.

With so many women in the house, squabbling was inevitable. With so many of the women Frasers, it was like walking through a gunpowder mill with a lit candle. Everyone tried so hard to manage, to keep in countenance, to accommodate—but that only made it worse when some spark finally set the powder keg off. He wasn’t only out hunting because they needed meat.

He spared a sympathetic thought for Claire. After Jenny’s anguished request, Claire had taken to hiding in their room or in Ian’s study—he had invited her to use it, and Jamie thought that aggravated Jenny still more—writing busily, making the book Andy Bell had put in her mind.

She had great powers of concentration and could stay inside her mind for hours—but she had to come out to eat. And it was always there, the knowledge that Ian was dying, grinding like a quern, slow but relentless, wearing away the nerves.

Ian’s nerves, too.

He and Ian had been walking—slowly—by the side of the loch two days before, when Ian stopped suddenly, curling in on himself like an autumn leaf. Jamie hurried to take him by the arm before he could fall, and he lowered him to the ground, finding a boulder to brace his back, pulling the shawl high around the wasted shoulders, looking for anything, anything at all he could do.

“What is it,
a charaid
?” he said, anxious, crouching beside his brother-in-law, his friend.

Ian was coughing, almost silently, his body shaking with the force of it. At last the spasm eased and he could draw breath, his face bright with the consumptive flush, that terrible illusion of health.

“It hurts, Jamie.” The words were spoken simply, but Ian’s eyelids were closed, as though he didn’t want to look at Jamie while he spoke.

“I’ll carry ye back. We’ll get ye a bit of laudanum, maybe, and—”

Ian waved a hand, quelling his anxious promises. He breathed shallowly for a moment before shaking his head.

“Aye, my chest feels like there’s a knife in it,” he said finally. “But that’s no what I meant. I’m no bothered so much about dying—but Christ, the slowness of it is killing me.” He did open his eyes then, meeting Jamie’s, and laughed as silently as he’d coughed, the barest breath of sound as his body shook with it.

“This dying hurts me, Dougal. I’d have it over.”
The words came into his mind as clearly as if they’d been spoken just now in front of him, rather than thirty years before in a dark church, ruined by cannon fire. Rupert had said that, dying slow.
“You’re my chief, man,”
he’d said to Dougal, imploring.
“It’s your job.”
And Dougal MacKenzie had done what love and duty called for.

He had been holding Ian’s hand, clasping hard, trying to force some notion of well-being from his own calloused palm into Ian’s thin gray skin. His thumb slid upward now, pressing on the wrist where he had seen Claire grip, searching out the truth of a patient’s health.

He felt the skin give, sliding across the bones of Ian’s wrist. He thought suddenly of the blood vow given at his marriage, the sting of the blade and Claire’s cold wrist pressed to his and the blood slick between them. Ian’s wrist was cold, too, but not from fear.

He glanced at his own wrist, but there was no trace of a scar, either from vows or fetters; those wounds were fleeting, long-healed.

“D’ye remember when we gave each other blood for blood?” Ian’s eyes were closed, but he smiled. Jamie’s hand tightened on the bony wrist, a little startled but not truly surprised that Ian had reached into his mind and caught the echo of his thoughts.

“Aye, of course.” He couldn’t help a small smile of his own, a painful one.

They’d been eight years old, the two of them. Jamie’s mother and her bairn had died the day before. The house had been full of mourners, his father dazed with shock. They had slipped out, he and Ian, scrambling up the hill behind the house, trying not to look at the fresh-dug grave by the broch. Into the wood, safe under the trees.

Had slowed then, wandering, come to a stop at last at the top of the high hill, where some old stone building that they called the fort had fallen down long ago. They’d sat on the rubble, wrapped in their plaids against the wind, not talking much.

“I thought I’d have a new brother,” he’d said suddenly. “But I don’t. It’s just Jenny and me, still.” In the years since, he’d succeeded in forgetting that small pain, the loss of his hoped-for brother, the boy who might have given him back a little of his love for his older brother, Willie, dead of the smallpox. He’d cherished that pain for a little, a flimsy shield against the enormity of knowing his mother gone forever.

Ian had sat thinking for a bit, then reached into his sporran and got out the wee knife his father had given him on his last birthday.

“I’ll be your brother,” he’d said, matter-of-fact, and cut across his thumb, hissing a little through his teeth.

He’d handed the knife to Jamie, who’d cut himself, surprised that it hurt so much, and then they’d pressed their thumbs together and sworn to be brothers always. And had been.

He took a deep breath, bracing himself against the nearness of death, the black finality.

“Ian. Shall I…” Ian’s eyelids lifted, the soft brown of his gaze sharpening into clarity at what he heard in the thickness of Jamie’s voice. Jamie cleared his throat hard and looked away, then looked back, feeling obscurely that to look away was cowardly.

“Will ye have me hasten ye?” he asked, very softly. Even as he spoke, the cold part of his mind sought the way. Not by the blade, no; it was quick and clean, a proper man’s departure, but it would cause his sister and the weans grief; neither he nor Ian had the right to leave a final memory stained with blood.

Ian’s grip neither slackened nor clung, but of a sudden Jamie felt the pulse he had looked for in vain, a small, steady throb against his own palm.

He hadn’t looked away, but his eyes blurred, and he bent his head to hide the tears.

Claire… She would know how, but he couldn’t ask her to do it. Her own vow kept her from it.

“No,” Ian said. “Not yet, anyway.” He’d smiled, eyes soft. “But I’m glad to ken ye’ll do it if I need ye to,
mo brathair.”

The flicker of a movement stopped him in his tracks and jerked him instantly from his thoughts.

It hadn’t seen him, though he was in sight. The wind was toward him, though, and the deer was busy, nibbling among the crusts of dry heather for sheltered bits of grass and softer moor plants.

He waited, listening to the wind. Only the deer’s head and shoulders were visible behind a gorse bush, though he thought from the size of the neck that it was a male.

He waited, feeling the way of it seep back into him. Hunting red deer on the moor was different from hunting in the forests of North Carolina. A slower thing altogether. The deer moved out a little from behind the gorse bush, intent on its feeding, and he began, by imperceptible degrees, to raise his rifle. He’d had a gunsmith in Edinburgh straighten the barrel for him but hadn’t used it since; he hoped it would aim true.

Hadn’t used it since he’d clouted the Hessian with it in the redoubt. He had a sudden, vivid recollection of Claire dropping the misshapen bullet that had killed Simon into the china plate, felt the chink and roll of it in his blood.

Another step, two; the deer had found something tasty and was tugging and chewing with great concentration. Like a thing completing itself, the muzzle of the rifle settled gently on its target. A big buck deer, and no more than a hundred yards. He could feel the big solid heart, pumping under his own ribs, pulsing in the tips of his fingers on the metal. The stock snugged hard into the hollow of his shoulder.

He was just beginning to squeeze the trigger when he heard the screams from the wood behind him. The gun went off, the shot went wild, the deer vanished with a crash of breaking heather, and the screams stopped.

He turned and strode fast into the woods, in the direction where he’d heard them, his heart pounding. Who? A woman, but who?

He found Jenny without much difficulty, standing frozen in the small clearing where he and she and Ian came when they were young, to share out stolen treats and play at knights and soldiers.

She’d been a good soldier.