Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [340]
Taken by surprise, Jamie laughed.
“Willie said that once, to me,” he said, and then the full lips clamped shut; he spoke rarely of his dead elder brother, and never, I imagined, had he mentioned Willie to Colum before.
If Colum noticed the slip, he gave no sign of it.
“I wrote to her then,” he said, looking abstractedly at one of the tilted stones nearby. “When your brother and the babe died of the pox. That was the first time, since she left Leoch.”
“Since she wed my father, ye mean.”
Colum nodded slowly, still looking away.
“Aye. She was older than me, ye ken, by two years or so; about the same as between your sister and you.” The deep-set gray eyes swiveled back and fixed on Jamie.
“I’ve never met your sister. Were ye close, the two of you?”
Jamie didn’t speak, but nodded slightly, studying his uncle closely, as though looking for the answer to a puzzle in the worn face before him.
Colum nodded, too. “It was that way between Ellen and myself. I was a sickly wee thing, and she nursed me often. I remember the sun shining through her hair, and she telling me tales as I lay in bed. Even later”—the fine-cut lips lifted in a slight smile—“when my legs first gave way; she’d come and go, all about Leoch, and stop each morning and night in my chamber, to tell me who she’d seen and what they’d said. We’d talk, about the tenants and the tacksmen, and how things might be arranged. I was married then, but Letitia had no mind for such matters, and less interest.” He flipped a hand, dismissing his wife.
“We talked between us—sometimes with Dougal, sometimes alone—of how the fortunes of the clan might best be maintained; how peace might be kept among the septs, which alliances could be made with other clans, how the lands and the timber should be managed.…And then she left,” he said abruptly, looking down at the broad hands folded on his knee. “With no asking of leave nor word of farewell. She was gone. And I heard of her from others now and then, but from herself—nothing.”
“She didn’t answer your letter?” I asked softly, not wanting to intrude. He shook his head, still looking down.
“She was ill; she’d lost a child, as well as having the pox. And perhaps she meant to write later; it’s an easy task to put off.” He smiled briefly, without humor, and then his face relaxed into somberness. “But by Christmas twelve-month, she was dead.”
He looked directly at Jamie, who met his gaze squarely.
“I was a bit surprised, then, when your father wrote to tell me he was taking you to Dougal, and wished ye then to come to me at Leoch for your schooling.”
“It was agreed so, when they wed,” Jamie answered. “That I should foster with Dougal, and then come to you for a time.” The dry twigs of a larch rattled in a passing wind, and he and Colum both hunched their shoulders against the sudden chill of it, their family resemblance exaggerated by the similarity of the gesture.
Colum saw my smile at their resemblance, and one corner of his mouth turned up in answer.
“Oh, aye,” he said to Jamie. “But agreements are worth as much as the men who make them, and nay more. And I didna know your father then.”
He opened his mouth to go on, but then seemed to reconsider what he had been about to say. The silence of the kirkyard flowed back into the space their conversation had made, filling in the gap as though no word were ever spoken.
It was Jamie, finally, who broke the silence once more.
“What did ye think of my father?” he asked, and I glimpsed in his tone that curiosity of a child who has lost his parents early, seeking clues to the identity of these people known only from a child’s restricted point of view. I understood the impulse; what little I knew