Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [211]
“The horses look fine.” Jamie, with a stockman’s eye, looked first to the animals’ welfare. I was rather more concerned with our own; getting inside, getting warm, and getting fed, as soon as possible.
We invited Ian’s friends to stay, but they declined, unloading Jamie in the dooryard and vanishing quickly to resume their vigilance over the departing Mohawk.
“They dinna like to stay in a white person’s house, Auntie,” Ian explained. “They think we smell bad.”
“Oh, really?” I said in pique, thinking of a certain elderly gentleman I had met in Anna Ooka, who appeared to have smeared himself with bear grease and then had himself sewn into his clothes for the winter. The pot calling the kettle black, if you asked me.
Much later, Christmas properly kept with a dram—or two—of whisky all round, we lay at last in our own bed, watching the flames of the newly kindled fire, and listening to Ian’s peaceful snores.
“It’s good to be home again,” I said softly.
“It is.” Jamie sighed and pulled me closer, my head tucked into the curve of his shoulder. “I did have the strangest dreams, sleeping in the cold.”
“You did?” I stretched, luxuriating in the soft yielding of the feather-stuffed mattress. “What did you dream about?”
“All kinds of things.” He sounded a bit shy. “I dreamt of Brianna, now and again.”
“Really?” That was a little startling; I too had dreamt of Brianna in our icy shelter—something I seldom did.
“I did wonder …” Jamie hesitated for a moment. “Has she a birthmark, Sassenach? And if so, did ye tell me of it?”
“She does,” I said slowly, thinking. “I don’t think I ever told you about it, though; it isn’t visible most of the time, so it’s been years since I noticed it, myself. It’s a—”
His hand tightening on my shoulder stopped me.
“It’s a wee brown mark, shaped like a diamond,” he said. “Just behind her left ear. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is.” It was warm and cozy in bed, but a small coolness on the back of my neck made me shiver suddenly. “Did you see that in your dream?”
“I kissed her there,” he said softly.
22
SPARK OF AN ANCIENT FLAME
Oxford, September 1970
“Oh, Jesus.” Roger stared at the page in front of him until the letters lost their meaning and became no more than curlicues. No such trick would erase the meaning of the words themselves; those were already carved into his mind.
“Oh, God, no!” he said out loud. The girl in the next carrel jerked in irritation at the noise, scraping the legs of her chair against the floor.
He leaned over the book, covering it with his forearms, eyes closed. He felt sick, and the palms of his hands were cold and sweaty.
He sat that way for several minutes, fighting the truth. It wasn’t going to go away, though. Christ, it had already happened, hadn’t it? A long time ago. And you couldn’t change the past.
Finally he swallowed the taste of bile in the back of his throat and looked again. It was still there. A small notice from a newspaper, printed on February 13, 1776, in the American Colony of North Carolina, in the town of Wilmington.
It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that destroyed their house in the settlement of Fraser’s Ridge, on the night of January 21 last. Mr. Fraser, a nephew of the late Hector Cameron of River Run plantation, was born at Broch Tuarach in Scotland. He was widely known in the colony and deeply respected; he leaves no surviving children.
Except that he did.
Roger grasped for a moment at the dim hope that it wasn’t them; there were, after all, any number of James Frasers, it was a fairly common name. But not James MacKenzie Fraser, not with a wife named Claire. Not born in Broch Tuarach, Scotland.