Voyager (82 page)

“No,” she said instantly. The needle had stopped, stuck halfway through a brilliant red bud in the pattern, the color of blood against the white smock.

“He’s old enough, Jenny,” Jamie said quietly.

“He’s not!” she objected. “He’s but barely fifteen; Michael and Jamie were both sixteen at least, and better grown.”

“Aye, but wee Ian’s a better swimmer than either of his brothers,” Ian said judiciously. His forehead was furrowed with thought. “It will have to be one of the lads, after all,” he pointed out to Jenny. He jerked his head toward Jamie, cradling his arm in its sling. “Jamie canna very well be swimming himself, in his present condition. Or Claire, for that matter,” he added, with a smile at me.

“Swim?” I said, utterly bewildered. “Swim where?”

Ian looked taken aback for a moment; then he glanced at Jamie, brows lifted.

“Oh. Ye hadna told her?”

Jamie shook his head. “I had, but not all of it.” He turned to me. “It’s the treasure, Sassenach—the seals’ gold.”

Unable to take the treasure with him, he had concealed it in its place and returned to Ardsmuir.

“I didna ken what best to do about it,” he explained. “Duncan Kerr gave the care of it to me, but I had no notion who it belonged to, or who put it there, or what I was to do with it. ‘The white witch’ was all Duncan said, and that meant nothing to me but you, Sassenach.”

Reluctant to make use of the treasure himself, and yet feeling that someone should know about it, lest he die in prison, he had sent a carefully coded letter to Jenny and Ian at Lallybroch, giving the location of the cache, and the use for which it had—presumably—been meant.

Times had been hard for Jacobites then, sometimes even more so for those who had escaped to France—leaving lands and fortunes behind—than for those who remained to face English persecution in the Highlands. At about the same time, Lallybroch had experienced two bad crops in a row, and letters had reached them from France, asking for any help possible to succor erstwhile companions there, in danger of starvation.

“We had nothing to send; in fact, we were damn close to starving here,” Ian explained. “I sent word to Jamie, and he said as he thought perhaps it wouldna be wrong to use a small bit of the treasure to help feed Prince Tearlach’s followers.”

“It seemed likely it was put there by one of the Stuarts’ supporters,” Jamie chimed in. He cocked a ruddy brow at me, and his mouth quirked up at one corner. “I thought I wouldna send it to Prince Charles, though.”

“Good thinking,” I said dryly. Any money given to Charles Stuart would have been wasted, squandered within weeks, and anyone who had known Charles intimately, as Jamie had, would know that very well.

Ian had taken his eldest son, Jamie, and made his way across Scotland to the seals’ cove near Coigach. Fearful of any word of the treasure getting out, they had not sought a fisherman’s boat, but instead Young Jamie had swum to the seals’ rock as his uncle had several years before. He had found the treasure in its place, abstracted two gold coins and three of the smaller gemstones, and secreting these in a bag tied securely round his neck, had replaced the rest of the treasure and made his way back through the surf, arriving exhausted.

They had made their way to Inverness then, and taken ship to France, where their cousin Jared Fraser, a successful expatriate wine merchant, had helped them to change the coins and jewels discreetly into cash, and taken the responsibility of distributing it among the Jacobites in need.

Three times since, Ian had made the laborious trip to the coast with one of his sons, each time to abstract a small part of the hidden fortune to supply a need. Twice the money had gone to friends in need in France; once it had been needed to purchase fresh planting-stock for Lallybroch and provide the food to see its tenants through a long winter when the potato crop failed.

Only Jenny, Ian, and the two elder boys, Jamie and Michael, knew of the treasure. Ian’s wooden leg prevented his swimming to the seals’ island, so one of his sons must always make the trip with him. I gathered that it had been something of a rite of passage for both Young Jamie and Michael, entrusted with such a great secret. Now it might be Young Ian’s turn.

“No,” Jenny said again, but I thought her heart wasn’t in it. Ian was already nodding thoughtfully.

“Would ye take him with ye to France, too, Jamie?”

Jamie nodded.

“Aye, that’s the thing. I shall have to leave Lallybroch, and stay away for a good bit, for Laoghaire’s sake—I canna be living here with you, under her nose,” he said apologetically to me, “at least not until she’s suitably wed to someone else.” He switched his attention back to Ian.

“I havena told ye everything that’s happened in Edinburgh, Ian, but all things considered, I think it likely best I stay away from there for a time, too.”

I sat quiet, trying to digest this news. I hadn’t realized that Jamie meant to leave Lallybroch—leave Scotland altogether, it sounded like.

“So what d’ye mean to do, Jamie?” Jenny had given up any pretense of sewing, and sat with her hands in her lap.

He rubbed his nose, looking tired. This was the first day he had been up; I privately thought he should have been back in bed hours ago, but he had insisted upon staying up to preside over dinner and visit with everyone.

“Well,” he said slowly, “Jared’s offered more than once to take me into his firm. Perhaps I shall stay in France, at least for a year. I was thinking Young Ian could go with us, and be schooled in Paris.”

Jenny and Ian exchanged a long look, one of those in which long-married couples are capable of carrying out complete conversations in the space of a few heartbeats. At last, Jenny tilted her head a bit to one side. Ian smiled and took her hand.

“It’ll be all right, mo nighean dubh,” he said to her in a low, tender voice. Then he turned to Jamie.

“Aye, take him. It’ll be a great chance for the lad.”

“You’re sure?” Jamie hesitated, speaking to his sister, rather than Ian. Jenny nodded. Her blue eyes glistened in the lamplight, and the end of her nose was slightly red.

“I suppose it’s best we give him his freedom while he still thinks it’s ours to give,” she said. She looked at Jamie, then at me, straight and steady. “But you’ll take good care of him, aye?”

This part of Scotland was as unlike the leafy glens and lochs near Lallybroch as the North Yorkshire moors. Here there were virtually no trees; only long sweeps of rock-strewn heather, rising into crags that touched the lowering sky and disappeared abruptly into curtains of mist.

As we got nearer to the seacoast, the mist became heavier, setting in earlier in the afternoon, lingering longer in the morning, so that only for a couple of hours in the middle of the day did we have anything like clear riding. The going was consequently slow, but none of us minded greatly, except Young Ian, who was beside himself with excitement, impatient to arrive.

“How far is it from the shore to the seals’ island?” he asked Jamie for the tenth time.

“A quarter mile, I make it,” his uncle replied.

“I can swim that far,” Young Ian repeated, for the tenth time. His hands were clenched tightly on the reins, and his bony jaw set with determination.

“Aye, I know ye can,” Jamie assured him patiently. He glanced at me, the hint of a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth. “Ye willna need to, though; just swim straight for the island, and the current will carry ye.”

The boy nodded, and lapsed into silence, but his eyes were bright with anticipation.

The headland above the cove was mist-shrouded and deserted. Our voices echoed oddly in the fog, and we soon stopped talking, out of an abiding sense of eeriness. I could hear the seals barking far below, the sound wavering and mixing with the crash of the surf, so that now and then it sounded like sailors hallooing to one another over the sound of the sea.

Jamie pointed out the rock chimney of Ellen’s tower to Young Ian, and taking a coil of rope from his saddle, picked his way over the broken rock of the headland to the entrance.

“Keep your shirt on ’til you’re down,” he told the lad, shouting to be heard above the wave. “Else the rock will tear your back to shreds.”

Ian nodded understanding, then, the rope tied securely round his middle, gave me a nervous grin, took two jerky steps, and disappeared into the earth.

Jamie had the other end of the rope wrapped round his own waist, paying out the length of it carefully with his sound hand as the boy descended. Crawling on hands and knees, I made my way over the short turf and pebbles to the crumbling edge of the cliff, where I could look over to the half-moon beach below.

It seemed a very long time, but finally I saw Ian emerge from the bottom of the chimney, a small, antlike figure. He untied his rope, peered around, spotted us at the top of the cliff, and waved enthusiastically. I waved back, but Jamie merely muttered, “All right, get on, then,” under his breath.

I could feel him tense beside me as the boy stripped off to his breeks and scrambled down the rocks to the water, and I felt his flinch as the small figure dived headlong into the gray-blue waves.

“Brrr!” I said, watching. “The water must be freezing!”

“It is,” Jamie said with feeling. “Ian’s right; it’s a vicious time of year to be swimming.”

His face was pale and set. I didn’t think it was the result of discomfort from his wounded arm, though the long ride and the exercise with the rope couldn’t have done it any good. While he had shown nothing but encouraging confidence while Ian was making his descent, he wasn’t making any effort to hide his worry now. The fact was that there was no way for us to reach Ian, should anything go wrong.

“Maybe we should have waited for the mist to lift,” I said, more to distract him than because I thought so.

“If we had ’til next Easter, we might,” he agreed ironically. “Though I’ll grant ye, I’ve seen it clearer than this,” he added, squinting into the swirling murk below.

The three islands were only intermittently visible from the cliff as the fog swept across them. I had been able to see the bobbing dot of Ian’s head for the first twenty yards as he left the shore, but now he had disappeared into the mist.

“Do you think he’s all right?” Jamie bent to help me scramble upright. The cloth of his coat was damp and rough under my fingers, soaked with mist and the fine droplets of ocean spray.

“Aye, he’ll do. He’s a bonny swimmer; and it’s none so difficult a swim, either, once he’s into the current.” Still, he stared into the mist as though sheer effort could pierce its veils.

On Jamie’s advice, Young Ian had timed his descent to begin when the tide began to go out, so as to have as much assistance as possible from the tide-race. Looking over the edge, I could see a floating mass of bladder wrack, half-stranded on the widening strip of beach.

“Perhaps two hours before he comes back.” Jamie answered my unspoken question. He turned reluctantly from his vain perusal of the mist-hidden cove. “Damn, I wish I’d gone myself, arm or no arm.”

“Both Young Jamie and Michael have done it,” I reminded him. He gave me a rueful smile.

“Oh, aye. Ian will do fine. It’s only that it’s a good deal easier to do something that’s a bit dangerous than it is to wait and worry while someone else does it.”

“Ha,” I told him. “So now you know what’s it like being married to you.”

He laughed.

“Oh, aye, I suppose so. Besides, it would be a shame to cheat Young Ian of his adventure. Come on, then, let’s get out of the wind.”

We moved inland a bit, away from the crumbling edge of the cliff, and sat down to wait, using the horses’ bodies as shelter. Rough, shaggy Highland ponies, they appeared unmoved by the unpleasant weather, merely standing together, heads down, tails turned against the wind.

The wind was too high for easy conversation. We sat quietly, leaning together like the horses, with our backs to the windy shore.

“What’s that?” Jamie raised his head, listening.

“What?”

“I thought I heard shouting.”

“I expect it’s the seals,” I said, but before the words were out of my mouth, he was up and striding toward the cliff’s edge.

The cove was still full of curling mist, but the wind had uncovered the seals’ island, and it was clearly visible, at least for the moment. There were no seals on it now, though.

A small boat was drawn up on a sloping rock shelf at one side of the island. Not a fisherman’s boat; this one was longer and more pointed at the prow, with one set of oars.

As I stared, a man appeared from the center of the island. He carried something under one arm, the size and shape of the box Jamie had described. I didn’t have long to speculate as to the nature of this object, though, for just then a second man came up the far slope of the island and into sight.

This one was carrying Young Ian. He had the boy’s half-naked body slung carelessly over one shoulder. It swung head down, arms dangling with a limpness that made it clear the boy was unconscious or dead.

“Ian!” Jamie’s hand clamped over my mouth before I could shout again.

“Hush!” He dragged me to my knees to keep me out of sight. We watched, helpless, as the second man heaved Ian carelessly into the boat, then took hold of the gunwales to run it back into the water. There wasn’t a chance of making the descent down the chimney and the swim to the island before they succeeded in making their escape. But escape to where?

“Where did they come from?” I gasped. Nothing else stirred in the cove below, save the mist and the shifting kelp-beds, turning in the tide.

“A ship. It’s a ship’s boat.” Jamie added something low and heartfelt in Gaelic, and then was gone. I turned to see him fling himself on one of the horses and wrench its head around. Then he was off, riding hell-for-leather across the headland, away from the cove.

Rough as the footing across the headland was, the horses were shod for it better than I was. I hastily mounted and followed Jamie, a high-pitched whinny of protest from Ian’s hobbled mount ringing in my ears.

It was less than a quarter of a mile to the ocean side of the headland, but it seemed to take forever to reach it. I saw Jamie ahead of me, his hair flying loose in the wind, and beyond him, the ship, lying to offshore.