The Fiery Cross (75 page)

He bowed to me again, as though by reflex.

“Morton,” Jamie said, softly, but with a certain amount of steel in his voice, “why have ye not gone? Did Fergus not tell ye that the militia is stood down?”

“Oh, aye, sir, he did, sir.” He bowed to Jamie this time, looking faintly anxious. “But I couldn’t go, sir, not without seeing Ally.”

I cleared my throat and glanced at Jamie, who sighed and nodded to me.

“Er . . . I’m afraid that Miss Brown has heard about your prior entanglement,” I said delicately.

“Eh?” Isaiah looked blank, and Jamie made an irritable noise.

“She means the lass kens ye’ve a wife already,” he said brutally, “and if her father doesna shoot ye on sight, she may stab ye to the heart. And if neither of them succeeds,” he went on, drawing himself up to his fully menacing height, “I’m inclined to do the job myself, wi’ my bare hands. What sort of man would slip round a lass and get her with child, and him with no right to give it his name?”

Isaiah Morton paled noticeably, even in the dim light.

“With child?”

“She is,” I said, quite coldly.

“She is,” Jamie repeated, “and now, ye wee bigamist, ye’d best leave, before—”

He stopped speaking abruptly, as Isaiah’s hand came out from under his cloak, holding a pistol. Close as he was, I could see that it was both loaded and cocked.

“I’m that sorry, sir,” he said apologetically. He licked his lips, glancing from Jamie to me, and back. “I wouldn’t do you harm, sir, nor certain sure your lady. But you see, I just got to see Ally.” His rather pudgy features firmed a little, though his lips seemed inclined to tremble. Still, he pointed the pistol at Jamie with decision.

“Ma’am,” he said to me, “if might be as you’d be so kind, would you go on into the house and fetch Ally out? We’ll . . . just wait here, the Colonel and me.”

I hadn’t had time to feel afraid. I wasn’t really afraid now, though I was speechless with astonishment.

Jamie closed his eyes briefly, as though praying for strength. Then he opened them and sighed, his breath a white cloud in the cold air.

“Put it down, idiot,” he said, almost kindly. “Ye ken fine ye willna shoot me, and so do I.”

Isaiah tightened both his lips and his trigger finger, and I held my breath. Jamie continued to look at him, his gaze a mixture of censure and pity. At last, the finger relaxed, and the pistol barrel sank, along with Isaiah’s eyes.

“I just got to see Ally, Colonel,” he said softly, looking at the ground.

I drew a deep breath, and looked up at Jamie. He hesitated, then nodded.

“All right, Sassenach. Go canny, aye?”

I nodded, and turned to slip into the house, hearing Jamie mutter something under his breath in Gaelic behind me, to the general effect that he must have lost his mind.

I wasn’t sure he hadn’t, though I had also felt the strength of Morton’s appeal. If any of the Browns happened to discover this rendezvous, though, there would be hell to pay—and it wouldn’t be only Morton who paid.

The floor inside was littered with sleeping bodies wrapped in blankets, though a few men still huddled round the hearth, gossiping and passing a jug of something spirituous among themselves. I looked carefully, but fortunately Richard Brown was not among them.

I made my way across the room, carefully stepping through and over the bodies on the floor, and peered into the bed that stood against the wall as I passed. Richard Brown and his wife were both curled up in it, sound asleep, nightcaps pulled well down over their respective ears, though the house was warm enough, what with all the trapped body heat.

There was only one place that Alicia Brown could be, and I pushed open the door to the loft stair, as quietly as I could. It made little difference; no one by the fire paid the slightest attention. One of the men appeared to be trying to get Hiram to drink from the jug, with some success.

By contrast to the room below, the loft was quite cold. This was because the small window was uncovered, and quite a lot of snow had drifted in, together with a freezing wind. Alicia Brown was lying in the little snowdrift under the window, stark naked.

I walked over and stood looking down at her. She lay stiffly on her back, arms folded over her chest. She was shivering, and her eyes were squinched shut with ferocious concentration. Obviously, she hadn’t heard my footsteps, over the noises from below.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” I inquired politely.

Her eyes popped open and she gave a small shriek. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and sat up abruptly, staring at me.

“I’ve heard of a number of novel ways of inducing miscarriage,” I told her, picking up a quilt from the cot and dropping it over her shoulders, “but freezing to death isn’t one of them.”

“If I’m d-dead, I won’t need to m-m-miscarry,” she said, with a certain amount of logic. Nonetheless, she drew the quilt around her, teeth chattering.

“Scarcely the best means of committing suicide, either, I shouldn’t think,” I said. “Though I don’t mean to sound critical. Still, you can’t do it now; Mr. Morton is out in the lean-to and won’t go away until you come down to speak to him, so you’d better get up and put something on.”

Her eyes flew wide and she scrambled to her feet, her muscles so stiff with cold that she stumbled awkwardly and would have fallen, had I not grabbed her arm. She said nothing more, but dressed as quickly as her chilled fingers would allow, wrapping a thick cloak around herself.

Bearing in mind Jamie’s adjuration to “Go canny,” I sent her down the narrow stair alone. Alone, she would be merely assumed to be going to the privy—if anyone even noticed her departure. Both of us together might cause comment.

Left by myself in the darkened loft, I drew my own cloak around me and went to the narrow window to wait for the few minutes necessary before I could leave, too. I heard the soft thump of the door closing below, but couldn’t see Alicia from this high angle. Judging from her response to my summons, she didn’t intend to stab Isaiah to the heart, but heaven knew what either of them
did
intend.

The clouds were gone now, and the frozen landscape stretched before me, brilliant and ghostly under a setting moon. Across the road, the horses’ brushy shelter stood dark, dappled with clumps of snow. The air had changed, as Jamie had said, and warmed by the horses’ breath, chunks of melting snow slid free and plopped to the ground.

In spite of my annoyance with the young lovers, and the undertones of comic absurdity attending the whole situation, I couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for them. They were so in earnest, so intent on nothing but each other.

And Isaiah’s unknown wife?

I hunched my shoulders, shivering slightly inside my cloak. I should disapprove—I did, in fact—but no one knew the true nature of a marriage, save those who made it. And I was too aware of living in a glass house, to think of throwing stones myself. Almost absently, I stroked the smooth metal of my gold wedding ring.

Adultery. Fornication. Betrayal. Dishonor. The words dropped softly in my mind, like the clumps of falling snow, leaving small dark pits, shadows in moonlight.

Excuses could be made, of course. I had not sought what had happened to me, had fought against it, had had no choice. Except that, in the end, one always has a choice. I had made mine, and everything had followed from it.

Bree, Roger, Jemmy. Any children that might be born to them in the future. All of them were here, in one way or another, because of what I had chosen to do, that far-off day on Craigh na Dun.

You take too much upon yourself
. Frank had said that to me, many times. Generally in tones of disapproval, meaning that I did things he would have preferred I did not. But now and then in kindness, meaning to relieve me of some burden.

It was in kindness that the thought came to me now, whether it was truly spoken, or only called forth from my exhausted memory for what comfort the words might hold. Everyone makes choices, and no one knows what may be the end of any of them. If my own was to blame for many things, it was not to blame for everything. Nor was harm all that had come of it.

’Til death us do part
. There were a great many people who had spoken those vows, only to abandon or betray them. And yet it came to me that neither death nor conscious choice dissolved some bonds. For better or for worse, I had loved two men, and some part of them both would be always with me.

The dreadful thing, I supposed, was that while I had often felt a deep and searing regret for what I had done, I had never felt guilt. With the choice so far behind me, now, perhaps, I did.

I had apologized to Frank a thousand times, and never once had I asked him for forgiveness. It occurred to me suddenly that he had given it, nonetheless—to the best of his ability. The loft was dark, save for faint lines of light that seeped through the chinks of the floor, but it no longer seemed empty.

I stirred abruptly, pulled from my abstraction by sudden movement below. Silent as flying reindeer, two dark figures darted hand-in-hand across the field of snow, cloaks like clouds around them. They hesitated for a moment outside the horses’ shelter, then disappeared inside.

I leaned on the sill, heedless of the snow crystals under my palms. I could hear the noise of the horses rousing; whickers and stamping came clearly to me across the clear air. The sounds in the house below had grown fainter; now a clear, loud
“Meh-eh-eh!”
came up through the floorboards, as Hiram sensed the horses’ uneasiness.

There was renewed laughter from below, temporarily drowning the sounds across the road. Where was Jamie? I leaned out, the wind billowing the hood of my cloak, brushing a spray of ice across my cheek.

There he was. A tall dark figure, walking across the snow toward the shelter, but going slowly, kicking up white clouds of dusty ice. What . . . but then I realized that he was following in the lovers’ tracks, stamping and floundering deliberately to obliterate a trail that must tell its story clearly to any of the trackers in the house below.

A hole appeared suddenly in the brushy shelter, as a section of the branched wall fell away. Clouds of steam roiled out into the air, and then a horse emerged, carrying two riders, and set off to the west, urged from a walk to a trot and then a canter. The snow was not deep; no more than three or four inches. The horse’s hooves left a clear dark trail, leading down the road.

A piercing whinny rose from the shelter, followed by another. Sounds of alarm came from below, scuffling and thuds as men rolled from their blankets or lunged for their weapons. Jamie had disappeared.

All at once, horses burst from the shelter, knocking down the wall and trampling the fallen branches. Snorting, whinnying, kicking, and jostling, they spilled out over the road in a chaos of flying manes and rolling eyes. The last of them sprang from the shelter and joined the runaway, tail whisking away from the switch that landed on its rump.

Jamie flung away the switch and ducked back into the shelter, just as the door below flung open, spilling pale gold light over the scene.

I seized the opportunity of the commotion to run downstairs without being seen. Everyone was outside; even Mrs. Brown had rushed out, nightcap and all, leaving the quilts pulled half off the bed. Hiram, smelling strongly of beer, swayed and
meh
ed tipsily at me as I passed, yellow eyes moist and protuberant with conviviality.

Outside, the roadway was full of half-dressed men, surging to and fro and waving their arms in agitation. I caught sight of Jamie in the midst of the crowd, gesticulating with the best of them. Among the excited bits of question and comment, I heard scraps of speech—“spooked” . . . “panther?” . . . “goddamn!” and the like.

After a bit of milling around and incoherent argument, it was unanimously decided that the horses would likely come back by themselves. Snow was blowing off the trees in veils of whirling ice; the wind stuck freezing fingers through every crevice of clothing.

“Would
you
stay out on a night like this?” Roger demanded, reasonably enough. It being generally decided that no sane man would—and horses being, if not quite sane, certainly sensible creatures—the party began to trickle back into the house, shivering and grumbling as the heat of excitement began to die down.

Among the last stragglers, Jamie turned toward the house and saw me, still standing on the porch. His hair was loose and the light from the open door lit him like a torch. He caught my eye, rolled his own toward heaven, and raised his shoulders in the faintest of shrugs.

I put cold fingers to my lips and blew him a small frozen kiss.