The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [607]
her.
I was filled with outrage at the hearing, but somewhat more filled with amazement to discover the cause. That being a sense of fury on your behalf—irrational as such fury might be, in the circumstances. Still, having discovered such an emotion springing full-blown in my breast. I was reluctantly compelled to the realization that my feelings for you must not in fact have perished altogether.
Here the text broke off, as Jenny had apparently been called away upon some domestic errand. It resumed, freshly dated, on the next page.
September 18, 1771
I dream of young Ian now and then. . . .
“What?” I exclaimed. “To hell with Young Ian—who was with Laoghaire?”
“I should like to know that myself,” Jamie muttered. The tips of his ears were dark with blood, but he didn’t look up from the page.
I dream of Ian now and then. These dreams most often take the shape of daily life, and I see him here at Lallybroch, but now and again I dream of him in his life among the savages—if indeed he still lives (and I persuade myself that my heart would by some means know if he did not).
So I see that what it comes to in the end is only the same thing with which I began—that one word, “Brother.” You are my brother, as young Ian is my son, the both of you my flesh and my spirit and always shall be. If the loss of Ian haunts my dreams, the loss of you haunts my days, Jamie.
He stopped reading for a moment, swallowing, then went on, his voice steady.
I have been writing letters all the morning, debating with myself whether to finish this one, or to put it into the fire instead. But now the accounts are done, I have written to everyone I can think of, and the clouds have gone away, so the sun shines through the window by my desk, and the shadows of Mother’s roses are falling over me.
I have thought to myself often and often that I heard my mother speak to me, through all these years. I do not need to hear her now, though, to ken well enough what she would say. And so I shall not put this in the fire.
You remember, do you, the day I broke the good cream-pitcher, flinging it at your head because you deviled me? I know you recall the occasion, for you once spoke to Claire of it. I hesitated to admit the crime, and you took the blame upon yourself, but Father kent the truth of it, and punished us both.
So now I am a grandmother ten times over, with my hair gone grey, and still I feel my cheeks go hot with shame and my wame shrink like a fist, thinking of Father bidding us kneel down side by side and bend over the bench to be whipped.
You yelped and grunted like a puppy when he tawsed you, and I could scarce breathe and did not dare to look at you. Then it was my turn, but I was so wrought with emotion that I think I barely felt the strokes. No doubt you are reading this and saying indignantly that it was only Father was softer with me because I was a lass. Well, maybe so, and maybe no; I will say Ian is gentle with his daughters.
Jamie snorted at this.
“Aye, ye’ve got that right,” he muttered. He rubbed his nose with one finger and resumed, drumming his fingers on the desk as he read.
But then Father said you would have another whipping, this one for lying—for the truth was the truth, after all. I would have got up and fled away then, but he bade me stay as I was, and he said to me, quiet, that while you would pay the price of my cowardice, he did not think it right for me to escape it altogether.
Do you know that you did not make a sound, the second time? I hope you did not feel the strokes of the tawse on your backside, because I felt each one.
I swore that day that I should not ever be a coward again.
And I see that it is cowardice indeed, that I should go on blaming you for Young Ian. I have always kent what it is to love a man—be he husband or brother, lover or son. A dangerous business; that’s what it is.
Men go where they will,