Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [130]
“It’s a fairly rich bit of ground, and there’s decent fishing and a good patch of forest for hunting. It maybe supports sixty crofts, and the small village—Broch Mordha, it’s called. Then there’s the manor house, of course—that’s modern,” he said, with some pride, “and the old broch that we use now for the beasts and the grain.
“Dougal and Colum were not at all pleased to have their sister marrying a Fraser, and they insisted that she not be a tenant on Fraser land, but live on a freehold. So, Lallybroch—that’s what the folk that live there call it—was deeded to my father, but there was a clause in the deed stating that the land was to pass to my mother, Ellen’s, issue only. If she died without children, the land would go back to Lord Lovat after my father’s death, whether Father had children by another wife or no. But he didn’t remarry, and I am my mother’s son. So Lallybroch’s mine, for what that’s worth.”
“I thought you were telling me yesterday that you didn’t have any property.” I sipped the wine, finding it rather good; it seemed to be getting better, the more I drank of it. I thought perhaps I had better stop soon.
Jamie wagged his head from side to side. “Well, it belongs to me, right enough. The thing is, though, it doesna do me much good at present, as I can’t go there.” He looked apologetic. “There’s the minor matter of the price on my head, ye see.”
After his escape from Fort William, he had been taken to Dougal’s house, Beannachd (means “Blessed,” he explained), to recover from his wounds and the consequent fever. From there, he had gone to France, where he had spent two years fighting with the French army, around the Spanish border.
“You spent two years in the French army and stayed a virgin?” I blurted out incredulously. I had had a number of Frenchmen in my care, and I doubted very much that the Gallic attitude toward women had changed appreciably in two hundred years.
One corner of Jamie’s mouth twitched, and he looked down at me sideways.
“If ye had seen the harlots that service the French army, Sassenach, ye’d wonder I’ve the nerve even to touch a woman, let alone bed one.”
I choked, spluttering wine and coughing until he was obliged to pound me on the back. I subsided, breathless and red-faced, and urged him to go on with his story.
He had returned to Scotland a year or so ago, and spent six months alone or with a gang of “broken men”—men without clans—living hand to mouth in the forest, or raiding cattle from the borderlands.
“And then, someone hit me in the head wi’ an ax or something o’ the sort,” he said, shrugging. “And I’ve to take Dougal’s word for what happened during the next two months, as I wasna taking much notice of things myself.”
Dougal had been on a nearby estate at the time of the attack. Summoned by Jamie’s friends, he had somehow managed to transport his nephew to France.
“Why France?” I asked. “Surely it was taking a frightful risk to move you so far.”
“More of a risk to leave me where I was. There were English patrols all over the district—we’d been fairly active thereabouts, ye see, me and the lads—and I suppose Dougal didna want them to find me lying senseless in some cottar’s hut.”
“Or in his own house?” I said, a little cynically.
“I imagine he’d ha’ taken me there, but for two things,” Jamie replied. “For one, he’d an English visitor at the time. For the second, he thought from the look of me I was going to die in any case, so he sent me to the abbey.”
The Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, on the French coast, was the domain, it seemed, of the erstwhile Alexander Fraser, now abbot of that sanctuary of learning and worship.