Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [258]
He turned to me, wordless, and the breath rushed from him as he pulled me hard against him. Our hands groped in the dying light of the setting sun, urgent in the touch of warmth, the reassurance of flesh, reminded by the hardness of the invisible bone beneath the skin, how short life is.
PART FIVE
“I Am Come Home”
30
LALLYBROCH
It was called Broch Tuarach, for the ancient cylinder of stone, built some hundreds of years before, that poked up from the hillside behind the manor. The people who lived on the estate called it “Lallybroch.” Insofar as I could gather, this meant “lazy tower,” which made at least as much sense as applying the term “North-facing Tower” to a cylindrical structure.
“How can something that’s round face north?” I asked as we made our way slowly down a long slope of heather and granite, leading the horses in single file down the narrow, twisting path the red deer had trampled through the springy growth. “It hasn’t got a face.”
“It has a door,” Jamie said reasonably. “The door faces north.” He dug in his feet as the slope dropped sharply, hissing through his teeth in signal to the horse he led behind him. The muscular hindquarters in front of me bunched suddenly, as the cautious stride altered to a tentative mincing, each hoof sliding a few inches in the damp earth before another step was risked. The horses, purchased in Inverness, were good-sized, handsome beasts. The wiry little Highland ponies would have made much better work of the steep slope, but these horses, all mares, were meant for breeding, not work.
“All right,” I said, stepping carefully over a tiny runnel of water that crossed the deer path. “Good enough. What about ‘Lallybroch,’ though? Why is it a lazy tower?”
“It leans a bit,” Jamie replied. I could see the back of his head, bent in concentration on the footing, a few tendrils of red-gold hair lifting from the crown in the afternoon breeze that blew up the slope. “Ye canna see it much from the house, but if you stand on the west side, you’ll see it leans to the north a bit. And if ye look from one of the slits on the top floor over the door, ye canna see the wall beneath you because of the slant.”
“Well, I suppose no one had heard of plumb lines in the thirteenth century,” I observed. “It’s a wonder it hasn’t fallen down by now.”
“Oh, it’s fallen down a number of times,” Jamie said, raising his voice slightly as the wind freshened. “The folk who lived there just put it back up again; that’s likely why it leans.”
“I see it! I see it!” Fergus’s voice, shrill with excitement, came from behind me. He had been allowed to stay on his mount, as his negligible weight was unlikely to cause the horse any great difficulty, bad footing notwithstanding. Glancing back, I could see him kneeling on his saddle, bouncing up and down with excitement. His horse, a patient, good-natured bay mare, gave a grunt at this, but kindly refrained from flinging him off into the heather. Ever since his adventure with the Percheron colt at Argentan, Fergus had seized every chance to get on a horse, and Jamie, amused and sympathetic to a fellow horse-lover, had indulged him, taking him up behind his own saddle when he rode through the Paris streets, allowing him now and then to get up alone on one of Jared’s coach horses, large stolid creatures that merely flicked their ears in a puzzled sort of way at Fergus’s kicks and shouts.
I shaded my eyes, looking in the direction where he pointed. He was right; from his higher vantage point, he had spotted the dark form of the old stone broch, perched on its hill. The modern manor-house below was harder to see; it was built of white-harled stone, and the sun reflected from its walls as from the surrounding fields. Set in a hollow of sloping barley fields, it was still partly obscured to our view by a row of trees that formed the windbreak at the foot of a field.
I saw Jamie’s head rise, and fix as he saw the home farm of Lallybroch below. He stood quite still for a minute, not speaking, but I saw his shoulders lift and set themselves