Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [328]
It was the effort to come up with an answer to the first of these that kept him going over and over it, as though the answer might afford him the key to the whole mystery of Brianna.
Yeah, he’d been lonely. Knew bloody well what it felt like to have no one in the world who belonged to you, or you to them. But surely that was one reason why they had reached out to each other—he and Brianna.
Claire knew, too, he thought suddenly. She’d been orphaned, lost her uncle—of course, she’d been married then. But she’d been separated from her husband during the war … yes, she knew a lot about being alone. And that was why she’d taken care not to leave Bree alone, to assure herself that her daughter was loved.
Well, he’d tried to love her properly—was still trying, he thought grimly, twisting uncomfortably in his hammock. During the day, the demands of work suppressed the growing needs of his body. At night, though … she was a deal too vivid, the Brianna of his memory.
He hadn’t hesitated; he’d known from the first moment of realization that he must follow her. Sometimes, though, he was not sure whether he had come to save her or to savage her—anything, so long as it was settled once and for all between them. He’d said he’d wait—but he’d waited long enough.
The worst of it was not the loneliness, he thought, flinging restlessly over again, but the doubt. Doubt of her feelings, and of his. Panic that he did not truly know her.
For the first time since his passage through the stones, he realized what she had meant in refusing him, and knew her hesitance for wisdom. But was it wisdom, and not only fear?
If she had not gone through the stones—would she have turned to him at last, wholeheartedly? Or turned away, always looking for something else?
It was a leap of faith—to throw one’s heart across a gulf, and trust another to catch it. His own was still in flight across the void, with no certainty of landing. But still in flight.
The sounds on the other side of the bulkhead had faded to silence, but now they started up again, in a stealthy, rhythmic fashion with which he was thoroughly familiar. They were at it again, whoever they were.
They did it almost every night, when the others had gone to sleep. At first the sounds had made him feel only his isolation, alone with the burning ghost of Brianna. There seemed no possibility of true human warmth, no joining of heart or mind, no more than the animal consolation of a body to cling to in the dark. Was there really any more for a man than this?
But then he began to hear something else in the sounds, half-caught words of tenderness, small furtive sounds of affirmation, that made him in some way not a voyeur, but a participant in their joining.
He couldn’t tell, of course. It might have been any of the couples, or a random pairing of lust—and yet he put faces to them, this unknown pair; in his mind, he saw the tall, fair-haired young man, the brown-haired lass with the open face, saw them look at each other as they had on the quay, and would have sold his soul to know such certainty.
38
FOR THOSE IN PERIL ON THE SEA
A sudden hard squall kept the passengers belowdecks for three days, and the sailors at their posts with no more than scant minutes snatched for rest or food. At the end of it, when the Gloriana rode high on the dying storm-swell and the dawn sky was filled with racing mare’s-tails, Roger staggered down to his hammock, too exhausted even to shuck his wet clothes.
Crumpled, damp, crusted with salt and feeling fit for nothing but a hot bath and another week’s sleep, he answered the bosun’s whistle for the afternoon watch after four hours rest, and staggered through his duties.
He was so tired by sunset that his muscles quivered as he helped to heave up a fresh water barrel from the hold. He caved in the top with a hatchet, thinking that he might just manage the exertion of ladling out water rations without falling headfirst into the barrel. Then again, he might not. He splashed a cool handful of the fresh water into his face, in hopes of soothing his