The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [50]
“Well, come and sit with me a moment, Mrs. Mac. It’s not important, but there’s a small thing I wanted to tell you about before the wedding.” He drew her down to sit beside him on a rotting log, rusted with lichen. He cleared his throat, gathering the thread of his story.
“When I was in Inverness, before I followed you through the stones, I spent some time trolling through the Reverend’s bumf, and I came across a letter to him, written by your father. By Frank Randall, I mean. It’s no great matter—not now—but I thought . . . well, I thought perhaps there should be no secrets between us, before we marry. I told your father about it last night. So let me tell you now.”
Her hand lay warm in his, but the fingers tightened as he talked, and a deep line grew between her brows as she listened.
“Again,” she said, when he’d finished. “Tell me that again.”
Obligingly, he repeated the letter—as he’d memorized it, word for word. As he’d told it the night before, to Jamie Fraser.
“That gravestone in Scotland with Da’s name on it is a fake?” Her voice rose slightly with astonishment. “Dad—Frank—had the Reverend make it, and put it there, in the kirkyard at St. Kilda, but Da isn’t—won’t be, I mean—won’t be under it?”
“Yes, he did, and no, he won’t,” Roger said, keeping careful track of the “he’s” involved. “He—Frank Randall, that is—meant the stone as a sort of acknowledgment, I think; a debt owed to your father—your other father, I mean; Jamie.”
Brianna’s face was blotched with chill, the ends of nose and ears nipped red as the heat of their lovemaking faded.
“But he couldn’t know we’d ever find it, Mama and me!”
“I don’t know that he wanted you to find it,” Roger said. “Perhaps he didn’t know, either. But he felt he had to make the gesture. Besides,” he added, struck by a memory, “didn’t Claire say that he’d meant to bring you to England, just before he was killed? Perhaps he meant to take you there, make sure you found it—then leave it to you and Claire what to do.”
She sat still, chewing that one over.
“He knew, then,” she said slowly. “That he—that Jamie Fraser survived Culloden. He knew . . . but he didn’t say?”
“I don’t think you can blame him for not saying,” Roger said gently. “It wasn’t only selfish, you know.”
“Wasn’t it?” She was still shocked, but not yet angry. He could see her turning it over, trying to see it all before making up her mind what to think, how to feel.
“No. Think of it, hen,” he urged. The spruce was cold at his back, the bark of the fallen log damp under his hand. “He loved your mother, aye, and didn’t want to risk losing her again. That’s maybe selfish, but she was his wife first, after all; no one could blame him for not wanting to give her up to another man. But that’s not all of it.”
“What’s the rest, then?” Her voice was calm, blue eyes straight and level.
“Well—what if he had told her? There she was, with you, a young child—and remember, neither of them would have thought that you might cross through the stones as well.”
The eyes were still straight, but clouded once more with trouble.
“She would have had to choose,” she said softly, her gaze fixed on him. “To stay with us—or go to him. To Jamie.”
“To leave you behind,” Roger said, nodding, “or to stay, and live her life, knowing her Jamie was alive, maybe reachable—but out of reach. Break her vows—on purpose, this time—and abandon her child . . . or live with yearning. I can’t think that would have done your family life much good.”
“I see.” She sighed, the steam of her exhaled breath disappearing like a ghost in cold air.
“Perhaps Frank was afraid to give her the choice,” Roger said, “but he did save her—and you—from the pain of having to make it. At least then.”
Her lips drew in, pushed out, relaxed.
“I wonder what her choice would have been, if he had told her,” she said, a little bleakly. He laid his hand on hers, squeezed lightly.
“She would have stayed,” he said, with certainty. “She made