Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [400]
He looked a right villain, he thought ruefully. No way to meet your in-laws. In truth, though, he wasn’t much concerned with what Claire and Jamie Fraser might think of him. His thoughts were all on Brianna.
She’d found her parents now; he could only hope that the reunion had been so satisfactory that she’d be in a mood to forgive his betrayal. Christ, he’d been stupid!
He made his way back toward the path, feet sinking in the soft leaf-layer. Stupid in underestimating her stubbornness, stupid not to have been honest with her, he amended. Stupid to have bullied her into secrecy. Trying to keep her safely in the future—no, that hadn’t been stupid at all, he thought, with a grimace at the things he’d seen and heard in the last few months.
He pushed aside an overhanging limb of loblolly pine, then ducked with an exclamation of alarm, as something black shot past his head.
A hoarse craawk! announced that his assailant was a raven. Similar cries gave notice of the arrival of reinforcements in the trees nearby, and within seconds, another black missile whizzed past, within inches of his ear.
“Hey, bugger off!” he exclaimed, ducking away from yet another croaking buzz bomb. He was plainly near a nest, and the ravens didn’t like it.
The first raven sailed back for another try. This pass knocked his hat into the dirt. The mobbing was unnerving, the sense of hostility out of all proportion to the size of his adversaries. Another came in, zooming low, and struck him a glancing blow as its claws ripped at the shoulder of his coat. Roger snatched up his hat and ran.
A hundred yards up the trail, he slowed to a walk and looked round. The birds were nowhere in sight; he’d passed their nesting place, then.
“And where’s Alfred Hitchcock when you need him?” he muttered to himself, trying to shake off the sense of danger.
His voice was damped at once by the thick vegetation; it was like talking into a pillow. He was breathing heavily, and his face felt flushed. All at once, it seemed very quiet in the forest. With the ceasing of the ravens’ racket, all the other birds seemed to have stopped as well. It was no wonder the old Scots thought ravens birds of bad omen; spend much longer here, and all the old ways that had been no more than curiosities would be flourishing away in his mind.
Dangerous, dirty, and uncomfortable as it was, he had to admit the fascination of being here—of experiencing at firsthand things he’d read about, seeing objects he knew as museum artifacts being casually used in daily life. If it wasn’t for Brianna, he might not regret the adventure, in spite of Stephen Bonnet and the things he had seen aboard the Gloriana.
Once more his hand went to his thigh. He had been luckier than he’d dared hope; Bonnet had had not one gemstone, but two. Would they really work? He ducked again, having to walk half crouched for several steps before the branches opened up again. Hard to believe that people lived up here, save that someone had cut this trail, and it must lead somewhere.
“You can’t miss it,” the girl at the mill had assured him, and he could see why. There wasn’t anyplace else to go.
He shaded his eyes, looking up the trail, but the drooping branches of pine and maple hid everything, presenting only a shadowy, mysterious tunnel through the trees. No telling how far it might be to the top of the ridge.
“You’ll make it by sundown, easy,” the girl had told him, and it was late midafternoon now. But that had been when he had a horse. Not wanting to be caught on the mountainside in the dark, he picked up his pace, straining his eyes for sunlight ahead that would show him the openness of the ridge at the end of the trail.
As he walked, his thoughts ran inevitably ahead of him, quick with speculation.
And how had it gone, Brianna’s reunion with her parents? What had she thought of Jamie Fraser? Was he the man she’d been imagining for the last year, or only a pale reflection of the image she had built up from her mother’s stories?