The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [480]
“Well, life certainly forces some things on one,” her mother murmured. She glanced up, meeting Brianna’s eyes, and her mouth quirked in a small, wry smile. “And for the common man—or woman—life as they find it is often the life they lead. Marsali, for instance. I shouldn’t think it’s ever entered her mind that she might do other than she does. Her mother kept a house and raised children; she sees no reason why she should do anything else. And yet—” Claire lifted one shoulder in a shrug, and reached across the table for the other mortar. “She had one great passion—for Fergus. And that was enough to jar her out of the rut her life would have been—”
“And into another just like it?”
Claire bent her head in a half-nod, not looking up.
“Just like it—except that she’s in America, rather than Scotland. And she’s got Fergus.”
“Like you have Jamie?” She seldom used his given name, and Claire glanced up in surprise.
“Yes,” she said. “Jamie’s part of me. So are you.” She touched Bree’s face, quick and light, then turned half away, reaching to take down a tied bundle of marjoram from the array of hanging herbs on the beam above the hearth. “But neither of you is all of me,” she said softly, back turned. “I am . . . what I am. Doctor, nurse, healer, witch—whatever folk call it, the name doesn’t matter. I was born to be that; I will be that ’til I die. If I should lose you—or Jamie—I wouldn’t be quite a whole person any longer, but I would still have that left. For a little time,” she went on, so softly that Brianna had to strain to hear her, “after I went . . . back . . . before you came . . . that was all I had. Just the knowing.”
Claire crumbled the dried marjoram into the mortar, and took up the pestle to grind it. The sound of clumping boots came from outside, and then Jamie’s voice, a friendly remark to a chicken that crossed his path.
And was loving Roger, loving Jemmy, not enough for her? Surely it should be. She had a dreadful, hollow feeling that perhaps it was not, and spoke quickly, before the thought should find words.
“What about Da?”
“What about him?”
“Does he—is he one who knows what he is, do you think?”
Claire’s hands stilled, the clanking pestle falling silent.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “He knows.”
“A laird? Is that what you’d call it?”
Her mother hesitated, thinking.
“No,” she said at last. She took up the pestle and began to grind again. The fragrance of dried marjoram filled the room like incense. “He’s a man,” she said, “and that’s no small thing to be.”
79
LONESOME ME
BRIANNA CLOSED THE BOOK, with a mingled sense of relief and foreboding. She hadn’t objected to Jamie’s notion that she teach a few of the little girls on the Ridge their ABC’s. It filled the cabin with cheerful noise for a couple of hours, and Jemmy loved the cosseting of a half-dozen miniature mothers.
Still, she was not a natural teacher, and always felt relieved at the end of a lesson. The foreboding came on its heels, though. Most of the girls came alone, or under the care of an older sister. Anne and Kate Henderson, who lived two miles away, were escorted by their older brother, Obadiah.
She wasn’t sure when or how it had started. Perhaps from the first day, when he had looked her in the eye, smiling faintly, and held the glance for a moment too long before patting his sisters’ heads and leaving them to her care. But there had been nothing she could reasonably object to. Not then, not in the days since. And yet . . .
Stated bluntly to herself, Obadiah Henderson gave her the creeps. He was a tall lad of twenty or so, heavily muscled and not bad-looking, brown-haired and blue-eyed. But there was something about him that was somehow not right; a sense of something brutal about the mouth, something feral in the deepset eyes. And something very unsettling in the way he looked at her.
She hated going to the door at the end of a lesson. The little girls would scatter in a flutter of dresses and giggles—and Obadiah would be waiting, leaning against a tree, sitting on the well-coping,