Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [41]
“Go back!” he had said. “There’s nothing here for ye! Nothing save danger.”
“Is there really nothing here for me?” I had asked. Too honorable to speak, he had answered nonetheless, and I had made my choice.
“It was too late,” I said, staring down at my hands, lying open on my knees. The day was darkening to rain, but my two wedding rings still gleamed in the fading light, gold and silver. I hadn’t taken Frank’s gold band from my left hand when I married Jamie, but had worn Jamie’s silver ring on the fourth finger of my right hand, for every day of the twenty-odd years since he put it there.
“I loved Frank,” I said quietly, not looking at Bree. “I loved him a lot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t,” I said, raising my head suddenly to Bree in appeal. She stared back at me, stone-faced.
I looked down at my hands again, and went on.
“He took me to his own home—Lallybroch, it was called. A beautiful place.” I shut my eyes again, to get away from the look on Brianna’s face, and deliberately summoned the image of the estate of Broch Tuarach—Lallybroch, to the people who lived there. A beautiful Highland farm, with woods and streams; even a bit of fertile ground—rare for the Highlands. A lovely, peaceful place, sealed within high hills above a mountain pass that kept it remote from the recurrent strife that troubled the Highlands. But even Lallybroch had proved only a temporary sanctuary.
“Jamie was an outlaw,” I said, seeing behind my closed eyelids the scars of flogging that the English had left on his back. A network of thin white lines that webbed the broad shoulders like a branded grid. “There was a price on his head. One of his own tenants betrayed him to the English. They captured him, and took him to Wentworth Prison—to hang him.”
Roger gave a long, low whistle.
“Hell of a place,” he remarked. “Have you seen it? The walls must be ten feet thick!”
I opened my eyes. “They are,” I said wryly. “I’ve been inside them. But even the thickest walls have doors.” I felt a small flicker of the blaze of desperate courage that had taken me inside Wentworth Prison, in pursuit of my heart. If I could do that for you, I told Jamie silently, I can do this as well. But help me, you bloody big Scot—help me!
“I got him out,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What was left of him. Jack Randall commanded the garrison at Wentworth.” Now I didn’t want to remember the images that my words brought back, but they wouldn’t stop. Jamie, naked and bloody, on the floor of Eldridge Manor, where we had found sanctuary.
“I wilna let them take me back again, Sassenach,” he’d said to me, teeth clenched against the pain as I’d set the crushed bones of his hand and cleansed his wounds. “Sassenach.” He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for an outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, and then in affection.
And I hadn’t let them find him; with the help of his kinsman, a little Fraser clansman called Murtagh, I’d gotten him across the Channel to France, and to refuge in the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, where one of his Fraser uncles was abbot. But once there in safety, I had found that saving his life was not the end of the task set me.
What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I was not sure, even now, what I had done, when I had summoned his demons and fought them single-handed, in the dark of his mind; there is very little difference between medicine and magic, when it comes to some kinds of healing.
I could still feel the cold, hard stone that bruised me, and the strength of the fury that I had