Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [208]
A man stood just within the archway, hesitating even as I was. His clothes were stained with mud and dust; a traveler of some sort. A messenger. And whatever the message, he had passed it on to Jamie, who was even now bending to whisper it in Colum’s ear.
No, not Colum. Dougal. The red head bent low between the two dark ones, the broad handsome features of the three faces taking on an unearthly similarity in the light of the dying candles. And as I watched, I realized that the similarity was due not so much to the inheritance of bone and sinew that they shared, but to the expression of shocked grief that they now held in common.
Geilie’s hand was digging into the flesh of my forearm.
“Bad news,” she said, unnecessarily.
* * *
“Twenty-four years,” I said softly. “It seems a long time to be married.”
“Aye, it does,” Jamie agreed. A warm wind stirred the branches of the tree above us, lifting the hair from my shoulders to tickle my face. “Longer than I’ve been alive.”
I glanced at him leaning on the paddock fence, all lanky grace and strong bones. I tended to forget how young he really was; he seemed so self-assured and capable.
“Still,” he said, flicking a straw into the churned mud of the paddock, “I doubt Dougal spent more than three years of that with her. He was generally here, ye ken, at the Castle—or here and there about the lands, doing Colum’s business for him.”
Dougal’s wife, Maura, had died at their estate of Beannachd. A sudden fever. Dougal himself had left at dawn, in company with Ned Gowan and the messenger who had brought the news the night before, to arrange the funeral and dispose of his wife’s property.
“Not a close marriage, then?” I asked curiously.
Jamie shrugged.
“As close as most, I should reckon. She had the children and the running of the house to keep her busy; I doubt she missed him greatly, though she seemed glad enough to see him when he came home.”
“That’s right, you lived with them for a time, didn’t you?” I was quiet, thinking. I wondered whether this was Jamie’s idea of marriage; separate lives, joining only infrequently for the breeding of children. Yet, from the little he had said, his own parents’ marriage had been a close and loving one.
With that uncanny trick of reading my thoughts, he said, “It was different wi’ my own folk, ye ken. Dougal’s was an arranged marriage, like Colum’s and a matter more of lands and business than the wanting of each other. But my parents—well, they wed for love, against the wishes of both families, and so we were…not cut off, exactly; but more by ourselves at Lallybroch. My parents didna go often to visit relatives or do business outside, and so I think they turned more to each other than husband and wife usually do.”
He laid a hand low on my back and urged me closer to him. He bent his head and brushed his lips across the top of my ear.
“It was an arrangement between us,” he said softly. “Still, I would hope…perhaps one day—” He broke off awkwardly, with a crooked smile and a gesture of dismissal.
Not wanting to encourage him in that direction, I smiled back as neutrally as I could, and turned toward the paddock. I could feel him there beside me, not quite touching, big hands gripping the top rail of the fence. I gripped the rail myself, to keep from taking his hand. I wanted more than anything to turn to him, offer him comfort, assure him with body and words that what lay between us was more than a business arrangement. It was the truth of it that stopped me.
What it is between us, he had said. When I lie with you, when you touch me. No, it wasn’t usual at all. It wasn’t a simple infatuation, either, as I had first thought. Nothing could be less simple.
The fact remained that I was bound, by vows and loyalty and law, to another man. And by love as well.
I could not, could not tell Jamie what I felt for him. To do that and then to leave, as I must, would be the height of cruelty. Neither could I lie to him.
“Claire.” He had turned to me, was looking down at me;