The Fiery Cross (17 page)

He oughtn’t ask, he knew that. He’d vowed never to voice the thought that Jemmy was not his, ever. If there was a true marriage between them, then Jem was the child of it, no matter the circumstances of his birth. And yet he felt the words spill out, burning like acid.

“So you were sure the child was his?”

She stopped dead and turned to look at him, eyes wide with shock.

“No. No, of course not! If I knew that, I would have told you!”

The burning in his chest eased, just a little.

“Oh. But you told him it was—you didn’t say to him that there was doubt about it?”

“He was going to die! I wanted to give him some comfort, not tell him my life story! It wasn’t any of his goddamn business to hear about you, or our wedding night, or—damn you, Roger!” She kicked him in the shin.

He staggered with the force of it, but grabbed her arm, preventing her from running off.

“I’m sorry!” he said, before she could kick him again, or bite him, which she looked prepared to do. “I’m sorry. You’re right, it wasn’t his business—and it’s not my business, either, to be making you think of it all again.”

She drew in a deep breath through her nose, like a dragon preparing to sear him into ash. The spark of fury in her eyes lessened slightly, though her cheeks still blazed with it. She shook off his hand, but didn’t run away.

“Yes, it is,” she said. She gave him a dark, flat look. “You said there shouldn’t be secrets between us, and you were right. But when you tell a secret, sometimes there’s another one behind it, isn’t there?”

“Yeah. But it’s not— I don’t mean—”

Before he could say more, the sound of feet and conversation interrupted him. Four men came out of the mist, speaking casually in Gaelic. They carried sharpened sticks and nets, and all were barefoot, wet to the knees. Strings of fresh-caught fish gleamed dully in the rain-light.

“A Smeòraich!”
One man, peering out from under the sodden brim of his slouch hat, caught sight of them and broke into a broad grin, as shrewd eyes passed over their dishevelment. “It is yourself, Thrush! And the daughter of the Red One, too? What, can you not restrain yourselves until the darkness?”

“No doubt it is sweeter to taste stolen fruit than to wait on a blessing from a shriveled priest.” Another man thrust back his bonnet on his head, and clasped himself briefly, making clear just what he meant by “shriveled.”

“Ah, no,” said the third, wiping drops from the end of his nose as he eyed Brianna, her cloak pulled tight around her. “He’s no but after singing her a wee wedding song, is he not?”

“I know the words to that song, too,” said his companion, his grin broadening enough to show a missing molar. “But I sing it still more sweetly!”

Brianna’s cheeks had begun to blaze again; her Gaelic was less fluent than Roger’s, but she was certainly able to gather the sense of crude teasing. Roger stepped in front of her, shielding her with his body. The men meant no harm, though; they winked and grinned appreciatively, but made no further comment. The first man pulled off his hat and beat it against his thigh, shedding water, then set to business.

“It’s glad I am to be meeting you thus,
a Òranaiche
. My mother did hear your music at the fire last night, and told it to my aunts and my cousins, how your music was making the blood dance in her feet. So now they will hear nothing but that you must come and sing for the ceilidh at Spring Creek. It is my youngest cousin will be wed, and her the only child of my uncle, who owns the flour mill.”

“It will be a great affair, surely!” put in one of the younger men, the son of the first speaker, by his resemblance to the former.

“Oh, it’s a wedding?” said Roger, in slow, formal Gaelic. “We’ll have an extra herring, then!”

The two older men burst into laughter at the joke, but their sons merely looked bewildered.

“Ah, the lads would not be knowing a herring, was it slapped wet against their cheeks,” said the bonneted man, shaking his head. “Born here, the two of them.”

“And where was your home in Scotland, sir?” The man jerked, surprised at the question, put in clear-voiced Gaelic. He stared at Brianna for a moment, then his face changed as he answered her.

“Skye,” he said softly. “Skeabost, near the foot of the Cuillins. I am Angus MacLeod, and Skye is the land of my sires and my grandsires. But my sons were born here.”

He spoke quietly, but there was a tone in his voice that quelled the hilarity in the younger men as though a damp blanket had been thrown over them. The man in the slouch hat looked at Brianna with interest.

“And were you born in Scotland,
a nighean
?”

She shook her head mutely, drawing the cloak higher on her shoulders.

“I was,” said Roger, answering a look of inquiry. “In Kyle of Lochalsh.”

“Ah,” said MacLeod, satisfaction spreading itself across his weathered features. “It is so, then, that you know all the songs of the Highlands and the Isles?”

“Not all,” said Roger, smiling. “But many—and I will learn more.”

“Do that,” said MacLeod, nodding slowly. “Do that, Singer—and teach them to your sons.” His eye lighted on Brianna, and a faint smile curled on his lips. “Let them sing to my sons, that they will know the place they came from—though they will never see it.”

One of the younger men stepped forward, bashfully holding out a string of fish, which he presented to Brianna.

“For you,” he said. “A gift for your wedding.”

Roger could see one corner of her mouth twitch slightly—with humor or incipient hysteria? he wondered—but she stretched out a hand and took the dripping string with grave dignity. She picked up the edge of her cloak with one hand, and swept them all a deep curtsy.

“Chaneil facal agam dhuibh ach taing,”
she said, in her slow, strangely accented Gaelic. I have no words to say to you but thanks.

The young men went pink, and the older men looked deeply pleased.

“It is good,
a nighean,
” said MacLeod. “Let your husband teach you, then—and teach the
Gaidhlig
to your sons. May you have many!” He swept off his bonnet and bowed extravagantly to her, bare toes squelching in the mud to keep his balance.

“Many sons, strong and healthy!” chimed in his companion, and the two lads smiled and nodded, murmuring shyly. “Many sons to you, mistress!”

Roger made the arrangements for the ceilidh automatically, not daring to look at Brianna. They stood in silence, a foot or two apart, as the men left, casting curious looks behind them. Brianna stared down into the mud and grass where they stood, arms crossed in front of her. The burning feeling was still in Roger’s chest, but now it was different. He wanted to touch her, to apologize again, but he thought that would only make things worse.

In the end, she moved first. She came to him and laid her head on his chest, the coolness of her wet hair brushing the wound in his throat. Her breasts were huge, hard as rocks against his chest, pushing against him, pushing him away.

“I need Jemmy,” she said softly. “I need my baby.”

The words jammed in his throat, caught between apology and anger. He had not realized how much it would hurt to think of Jemmy as belonging to someone else—not his, but Bonnet’s.

“I need him, too,” he whispered at last, and kissed her briefly on the forehead before taking her hand to cross the meadow once again. The mountain above lay shrouded in mist, invisible, though shouts and murmurs, scraps of speech and music drifted down, like echoes from Olympus.

T
HE DRIZZLE HAD STOPPED by mid-morning, and brief glimpses of pale blue sky showed through the clouds, giving me some hope that it might clear by evening. Proverbs and omens quite aside, I didn’t want the wedding ceremonies dampened for Brianna’s sake. It wouldn’t be St. James’s with rice and white satin, but it could at least be
dry
.

I rubbed my right hand, working out the cramp from the tooth-pulling pliers; Mr. Goodwin’s broken tooth had been more troublesome to extract than I expected, but I had managed to get it out, roots and all, sending him away with a small bottle of raw whisky, and instructions to swish it round his mouth once an hour to prevent infection. Swallowing was optional.

I stretched, feeling the pocket under my skirt swing against my leg with a small but gratifying
chink
. Mr. Goodwin had indeed paid cash; I wondered whether it was enough for an astrolabe, and what on earth Jamie wanted with one. My speculations were disturbed, though, by a small but official-sounding cough behind me.

I turned around to find Archie Hayes, looking mildly quizzical.

“Oh!” I said. “Ah—can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“Weel, that’s as may be, Mistress Fraser,” he said, looking me over with a slight smile. “Farquard Campbell said his slaves are convinced that ye can raise the dead, so it might be as a bit of stray metal would pose no great trial to your skills as a surgeon?”

Murray MacLeod, overhearing, uttered a loud snort at this, and turned away to his own waiting patients.

“Oh,” I said again, and rubbed a finger under my nose, embarrassed. One of Campbell’s slaves had suffered an epileptic seizure four days before, happening to recover abruptly from it just as I laid an exploratory hand on his chest. In vain had I tried to explain what had happened; my fame had spread like wildfire over the mountain.

Even now, a small group of slaves squatted near the edge of the clearing, playing at knucklebones and waiting ’til the other patients should be attended to. I gave them a narrow eye, just in case; if one of them were dying or dangerously ill, I knew they would make no effort to tell me—both from deference to my white patients, and from their confident conviction that if anything drastic should happen while they were waiting, I would simply resurrect the corpse at my own convenience and deal with the problem then.

All of them seemed safely vertical at the moment, though, and likely to remain so for the immediate future. I turned back to Hayes, wiping muddy hands on my apron.

“Well . . . let me see the bit of metal, why don’t you, and I’ll see what can be done.”

Nothing loath, Hayes stripped off bonnet, coat, waistcoat, stock, and shirt, together with the silver gorget of his office. He handed his garments to the aide who accompanied him, and sat down on my stool, his placid dignity quite unimpaired by partial nakedness, by the gooseflesh that stippled his back and shoulders, or by the murmur of awed surprise that went up from the waiting slaves at sight of him.

His torso was nearly hairless, with the pale, suety color of skin that had gone years with no exposure to sunlight, in sharp contrast to the weathered brown of his hands, face, and knees. The contrasts went further than that, though.

Over the milky skin of his left breast was a huge patch of bluish-black that covered him from ribs to clavicle. And while the nipple on the right was a normal brownish-pink, the one on the left was a startling white. I blinked at the sight, and heard a soft
“A Dhia!”
behind me.

“A Dhia, tha e ’tionndadh dubh!”
said another voice, somewhat louder. By God, he is turning black!

Hayes appeared not to hear any of this, but sat back to let me make my examination. Close inspection revealed that the dark coloration was not natural pigmentation but a mottling caused by the presence of innumerable small dark granules embedded in the skin. The nipple was gone altogether, replaced by a patch of shiny white scar tissue the size of a sixpence.

“Gunpowder,” I said, running my fingertips lightly over the darkened area. I’d seen such things before; caused by a misfire or shot at close range, which drove particles of powder—and often bits of wadding and cloth—into the deeper layers of the skin. Sure enough, there were small bumps beneath the skin, evident to my fingertips, dark fragments of whatever garment he had been wearing when shot.

“Is the ball still in you?” I could see where it had entered; I touched the white patch, trying to envision the path the bullet might have taken thereafter.

“Half of it is,” he replied tranquilly. “It shattered. When the surgeon went to dig it out, he gave me the bits of it. When I fitted them together after, I couldna make but half a ball, so the rest of it must have stayed.”

“Shattered? A wonder the pieces didn’t go through your heart or your lung,” I said, squatting down in order to squint more closely at the injury.

“Oh, it did,” he informed me. “At least, I suppose that it must, for it came in at my breest as ye see—but it’s keekin’ out from my back just now.”

To the astonishment of the multitudes—as well as my own—he was right. I could not only feel a small lump, just under the outer border of his left scapula, I could actually
see
it; a darkish swelling pressing against the soft white skin.

“I will be damned,” I said, and he gave a small grunt of amusement, whether at my surprise or my language, I couldn’t tell.

Odd as it was, the bit of shrapnel presented no surgical difficulty. I dipped a cloth into my bowl of distilled alcohol, wiped the area carefully, sterilized a scalpel, and cut quickly into the skin. Hayes sat quite still as I did it; he was a soldier and a Scot, and as the markings on his breast bore witness, he had endured much worse than this.