A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [495]
He sighed, and made a brief gesture of frustration.
“What? To say I was sorry—that’s not right. I am sorry, but to say so—it sounds as though I’ve done something to be sorry for, and that I have not. But I thought to start off so would make ye maybe think . . .” He glanced at me. I was keeping a tight grip on both my face and my emotions, but he knew me very well. The instant he’d said, “I’m sorry,” my stomach had plunged toward my feet.
He looked away.
“There’s naught I can say,” he said quietly, “that doesna sound as though I try to defend or excuse myself. And I willna do that.”
I made a small sound, as though someone had punched me in the stomach, and he glanced sharply at me.
“I won’t do it!” he said fiercely. “There is no way to deny such a charge that doesna carry the stink of doubt about it. And nothing I can say to you that doesna sound like some groveling apology for—for—well, I willna apologize for something I havena done, and if I did, ye’d only doubt me more.”
I was beginning to breathe a little easier.
“You don’t seem to have a lot of faith in my faith in you.”
He gave me a wary look.
“If I hadna got quite a lot of it, Sassenach, I wouldna be here.”
He watched me for a moment, then reached out and touched my hand. My fingers turned at once and curved to meet his, and our hands clasped tight. His fingers were big and cold and he held mine so tightly that I thought my bones would break.
He took a deep breath, almost a sob, and his shoulders, tight in his sodden coat, relaxed all at once.
“Ye didna think it true?” he asked. “Ye ran away.”
“It was a shock,” I said. And I’d thought, dimly, that if I stayed, I might just kill her.
“Aye, it was,” he said very dryly. “I expect I might have run away myself—if I could.”
A small twinge of guilt was added to the overload of emotions; I supposed my hasty exit couldn’t have helped the situation. He didn’t reproach me, though, but merely said again, “Ye didna think it true, though?”
“I don’t.”
“Ye don’t.” His eyes searched mine. “But ye did?”
“No.” I pulled the cloak closer round me, settling it on my shoulders. “I didn’t. But I didn’t know why.”
“And now ye do.”
I took a deep, deep breath of my own and let it go, then turned to face him, straight on.
“Jamie Fraser,” I said, with great deliberation. “If you could do such a thing as that—and I don’t mean lying with a woman, I mean doing it and lying to me about it—then everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been—my whole life—has been a lie. And I am not prepared to admit such a thing.”
That surprised him a little; it was nearly dark now, but I saw his eyebrows rise.
“What d’ye mean by that, Sassenach?”
I waved a hand up the trail, where the house lay invisible above us, then toward the spring, where the white stone stood, a blur in the dark.
“I don’t belong here,” I said softly. “Brianna, Roger . . . they don’t belong here. Jemmy shouldn’t be here; he should be watching cartoons on television, drawing pictures of cars and airplanes with crayons—not learning to shoot a gun as big as he is and cut the entrails from a deer.”
I lifted my face and closed my eyes, feeling the damp settle on my skin, heavy on my lashes.
“But we are here, all of us. And we’re here because I loved you, more than the life that was mine. Because I believed you loved me the same way.”
I took a deep breath, so that my voice wouldn’t tremble, opened my eyes and turned to him.
“Will you tell me that’s not true?”
“No,” he said after a moment, so softly I could barely hear him. His hand tightened harder on mine. “No, I willna tell ye that. Not ever, Claire.”
“Well, then,” I said, and felt the anxiety and fury and fear of the afternoon run out of me like water. I rested my head on his shoulder, and breathed the rain and sweat on his skin. He smelled acrid, pungent with the musk of fear and curdled anger.
It was entirely dark by now. I could hear sounds in the distance, Mrs. Bug calling to Arch from the stable where she’d been milking the goats, and his cracked old voice hallooing