Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [196]
I laid my hand on his head; the short hair felt bristly but soft, like a very young hedgehog.
“I don’t think it was wrong,” I said softly. “But if it was…then I’ll go to the Devil with you, Jamie Fraser.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head over my foot. He held it so tightly that I could feel the long, slender metatarsals pressed together; still, I didn’t pull back. I dug my fingers into his scalp and tugged his hair gently.
“Why then, Jamie? Why did you decide to let Jack Randall live?”
He still gripped my foot, but opened his eyes and smiled at me.
“Well, I thought a number of things, Sassenach, as I walked up and down that evening. For one thing, I thought that you would suffer, if I did kill the filthy scut. I would do, or not do, quite a few things to spare you distress, Sassenach, but—how heavily does your conscience weigh, against my honor?
“No.” He shook his head again, disposing of another point. “Each one of us can be responsible only for his own actions and his own conscience. What I do canna be laid to your account, no matter what the effects.” He blinked, eyes watering from the dusty wind, and passed a hand across his hair in a vain attempt to smooth the disheveled ends. Clipped short, the spikes of a cowlick stood up on the crest of his skull in a defiant spray.
“Why, then?” I demanded, leaning forward. “You’ve told me all the reasons why not; what’s left?”
He hesitated for a moment, but then met my eyes squarely.
“Because of Charles Stuart, Sassenach. So far we have stopped all the earths, but with this investment of his—well, he might yet succeed in leading an army in Scotland. And if so…well, ye ken better than I do what may come, Sassenach.”
I did, and the thought turned me cold. I could not help remembering one historian’s description of the Highlanders’ fate at Culloden—“the dead lay four deep, soaking in rain and their own blood.”
The Highlanders, mismanaged and starving, but ferocious to the end, would be wasted in one decisive half-hour. They would be left to lie in heaps, bleeding in a cold April rain, the cause they had cherished for a hundred years dead along with them.
Jamie reached forward suddenly and took my hands.
“I think it will not happen, Claire; I think we will stop him. And if not, then still I dinna expect anything to happen to me. But if it should…” He was in deadly earnest now, speaking soft and urgently. “If it does, then I want there to be a place for you; I want someone for you to go to if I am…not there to care for you. If it canna be me, then I would have it be a man who loves you.” His grasp on my fingers grew tighter; I could feel both rings digging into my flesh, and felt the urgency in his hands.
“Claire, ye know what it cost me to do this for you—to spare Randall’s life. Promise me that if the time should come, you’ll go back to Frank.” His eyes searched my face, deep blue as the sky in the window behind him. “I tried to send ye back twice before. And I thank God ye wouldna go. But if it comes to a third time—then promise me you will go back to him—back to Frank. For that is why I spare Jack Randall for a year—for your sake. Promise me, Claire?”
“Allez! Allez! Montez!” the coachman shouted from above, encouraging the team up a slope. We were nearly there.
“All right,” I said at last. “I promise.”
* * *
The stables at Argentan were clean and airy, redolent of summer and the smell of horses. In an open box stall, Jamie circled a Percheron mare, enamored as a horsefly.
“Ooh, what a bonnie wee lass ye are! Come here, sweetheart, let me see that beautiful fat rump. Mm, aye, that’s grand!”
“I wish my husband would talk that way to me,” remarked the Duchesse de Neve, provoking giggles from the other ladies of the party, who stood in the straw of the central aisle, watching.
“Perhaps he would, Madame, if your own back view provided such stimulation. But then, perhaps your