Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [269]
He laughed at that, and I squeezed his arm once more.
“As for the work…there’s work for me here.” I glanced down into the basket of herbs and medicines on my arm. “I can be useful. And if I miss Mother Hildegarde, or my other friends—well, it isn’t as fast as a telephone, but there are always letters.”
I stopped, holding his arm, and looked up at him. The sun was setting, and the light gilded one side of his face, throwing the strong bones into relief.
“Jamie…I only want to be where you are. Nothing else.”
He stood still for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed me very gently on the forehead.
* * *
“It’s funny,” I said as we came over the crest of the last small hill that led down to the house. “I had just been wondering the same kinds of things about you. Whether you’d be happy here, after the things you did in France.”
He smiled, half-ruefully, and looked toward the house, its three stories of white-harled stone glowing gold and umber in the sunset.
“Well, it’s home, Sassenach. It’s my place.”
I touched him gently on the arm. “And you were born to it, you mean?”
He drew a deep breath, and reached out to rest a hand on the wooden fence-rail that separated this lower field from the grounds near the house.
“Well, in fact I wasna born to it, Sassenach. By rights, it should have been Willie was lairdie here. Had he lived, I expect I would have been a soldier—or maybe a merchant, like Jared.”
Willie, Jamie’s elder brother, had died of the smallpox at the age of eleven, leaving his small brother, aged six, as the heir to Lallybroch.
He made an odd half-shrugging gesture, as though seeking to ease the pressure of his shirt across his shoulders. It was something he did when feeling awkward or unsure; I hadn’t seen him do it in months.
“But Willie died. And so I am laird.” He glanced at me, a little shyly, then reached into his sporran and pulled something out. A little cherrywood snake that Willie had carved for him as a birthday gift lay on his palm, head twisted as though surprised to see the tail following it.
Jamie stroked the little snake gently; the wood was shiny and seasoned with handling, the curves of the body gleaming like scales in early twilight.
“I talk to Willie, sometimes, in my mind,” Jamie said. He tilted the snake on his palm. “If you’d lived, Brother, if ye’d been laird as you were meant to be, would ye do what I’ve done? or would ye find a better way?” He glanced down at me, flushing slightly. “Does that sound daft?”
“No.” I touched the snake’s smooth head with a fingertip. The high clear call of a meadowlark came from the far field, thin as crystal in the evening air.
“I do the same,” I said softly, after a moment. “With Uncle Lamb. And my parents. My mother especially. I—I didn’t think of her often, when I was young, just every now and then I’d dream about someone soft and warm, with a lovely singing voice. But when I was sick, after…Faith—sometimes I imagined she was there. With me.” A sudden wave of grief swept over me, remembrance of losses recent and long past.
Jamie touched my face gently, wiping away the tear that had formed at the corner of one eye but not quite fallen.
“I think sometimes the dead cherish us, as we do them,” he said softly. “Come on, Sassenach. Let’s walk a bit; there’s time before dinner.”
He linked my arm in his, tight against his side, and we turned along the fence, walking slowly, the dry grass rustling against my skirt.
“I ken what ye mean, Sassenach,” Jamie said. “I hear my father’s voice sometimes, in the barn, or in the field. When I’m not even thinkin’ of him, usually. But all at once I’ll turn my head, as though I’d just heard him outside, laughing wi’ one of the tenants, or behind me, gentling a horse.”
He laughed suddenly, and nodded toward a corner of the pasture before us.
“It’s a wonder I dinna hear him here, but I never have.”
It was a thoroughly unremarkable spot, a wood-railed gate in the stone fence that paralleled the road.
“Really? What did he used to say here?”