Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [154]
“Claire, ye do kill me, knife or no,” he whispered, face buried in my hair. He bent and picked me up, carrying me to the bed. He sank to his knees, laying me amid the rumpled quilts.
“You’ll lie wi’ me now,” he said quietly. “And I shall use ye as I must. And if you’ll have your revenge for it, then take it and welcome, for my soul is yours, in all the black corners of it.”
The skin of his shoulders was warm with the heat of the bath, but he shivered as with cold as my hands traveled up to his neck, and I pulled him down to me.
And when I had at length taken my last revenge of him, I did cradle him, stroking back the roughened, half-dry locks.
“And sometimes,” I whispered to him, “I wish it could be you inside me. That I could take you into me and keep you safe always.”
His hand, large and warm, lifted slowly from the bed and cupped the small round swell of my belly, sheltering and caressing.
“You do, my own,” he said. “You do.”
* * *
I felt it for the first time while lying in bed the next morning, watching Jamie dress for the day. A tiny fluttering sensation, at once entirely familiar and completely new. Jamie had his back turned to me, as he wriggled into his knee-length shirt and stretched his arms, settling the folds of white linen across the breadth of his shoulders.
I lay quite still, waiting, hoping for it to come again. It did, this time as a series of infinitesimal quick movements, like the bursting of bubbles rising to the surface of a carbonated liquid.
I had a sudden memory of Coca-Cola; that odd, dark, fizzy American drink. I had tasted it once, while having supper with an American colonel, who served it as a delicacy—which it was, in wartime. It came in thick greenish bottles, smooth-ribbed and tapered, with a high-waisted nip to the glass, so that the bottle was roughly woman-shaped, with a rounded bulge just below the neck, swelling to a broader one farther down.
I remembered how the millions of tiny bubbles had rushed into the narrow neck when the bottle was opened, smaller and finer than the bubbles of champagne, bursting joyous in the air. I laid one hand very gently on my abdomen, just above the womb.
There it was. There was no sense of him, or her, as I had thought there might be—but there was certainly a sense of Someone. I wondered whether perhaps babies had no gender—physical characteristics aside—until birth, when the act of exposure to the outside world set them forever as one or the other.
“Jamie,” I said. He was tying back his hair, gathering it into a thick handful at the base of his neck and winding a leather lace about it. Head bent in the task, he looked up at me from under his brows and smiled.
“Awake, are ye? It’s early yet, mo duinne. Go back to sleep for a bit.”
I had been going to tell him, but something stopped me. He couldn’t feel it, of course, not yet. It wasn’t that I thought he wouldn’t care, but there was something about that first awareness that seemed suddenly private; the second shared secret between me and the child—the first being our knowledge of its existence, mine a conscious knowing, the embryo’s a simple being. The sharing of that knowledge linked us close as did the blood that passed through both of us.
“Do you want me to braid your hair for you?” I asked. When he went to the docks, sometimes he would ask me to plait his ruddy mane in a tight queue, proof against the tugging winds on deck and quay. He always teased that he would have it dipped in tar, as the sailors did, to solve the problem permanently.
He shook his head, and reached for his kilt.
“No, I’m going to call on His Highness Prince Charles today. And drafty as his house is, I think it wilna be blowing my hair in my eyes.” He smiled at me, coming to stand by the bed. He saw my hand lying on my stomach, and put his own lightly over it.
“Feeling all right, are ye, Sassenach? The sickness is better?”
“Much.” The morning sickness had in fact abated, though waves of nausea still assailed me at odd moments. I found I could not bear the smell of