The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [639]
I knew what Jamie was, too, and while the thought of his going to deal with Stephen Bonnet was enough to make me feel as though I were hanging from a fraying rope over a bottomless pit, I did know that there were few men better equipped for such a task. For beyond the question of deadly skill, which he certainly had, there was the question of conscience.
Jamie was a Highlander. While the Lord might insist that vengeance was His, no male Highlander of my acquaintance had ever thought it right that the Lord should be left to handle such things without assistance. God had made man for a reason, and high on the list of those reasons was the protection of a family and the defense of its honor—whatever the cost.
What Bonnet had done to Brianna was not a crime that Jamie would ever forgive, let alone forget. And beyond simple vengeance, and the continuing threat that Bonnet might pose to Bree or Jemmy, there was the fact that Jamie felt himself responsible, at least in part, for such harm as Bonnet might do in the world—to our family, or to others. He had helped Bonnet to escape the gallows once; he would not be at peace until he had amended that mistake—and said so.
“Fine!” Brianna had hissed at him, fists clenched at her sides. “So you’ll be at peace. Just fine! And how peaceful do you think Mama and I will be, if you or Roger is dead?”
“Ye’d prefer me to be a coward? Or your husband?”
“Yes!”
“No, ye wouldn’t,” he said with certainty. “Ye only think so now, because ye’re afraid.”
“Of course I’m afraid! So is Mama, only she won’t say so, because she thinks you’ll go anyway!”
“If she does think so, she’s right,” Jamie said, giving me a sidelong look, with a hint of a smile. “She’s known me a long time, aye?”
I glanced at him, but shook my head and turned away, sealing my lips and staring out at the masts of the ships anchored in the harbor while the argument raged on.
Roger had finally put a stop to it.
“Brianna,” he said softly, when she paused for breath. She turned toward him, face anguished, and he touched her shoulder. “I willna have this man in the same world as my children,” he said, still softly, “or my wife. Do we go then with your blessing—or without it?”
She had sucked in her breath, bitten her lip, and turned away. I saw the tears brimming in her eyes, and the working of her throat as she swallowed them. She said no more.
Whatever word of blessing she had given him had been spoken in the night, in the quiet of their bed. I had given Jamie blessing and farewell in that same darkness—still without speaking a word. I couldn’t. He would go, no matter what I said.
Neither of us slept that night; we lay in each other’s arms, silently aware of each breath and shift of body, and when the shutters began to show cracks of gray light, we rose—he to make his preparations, I because I could not lie still and watch him go.
As he left, I stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and whispered the only important thing.
“Come back,” I’d said. He’d smiled at me, smoothing a curl behind my ear.
“Ye ken what I said at Alamance? Well, it’s no today, either, Sassenach. We’ll both be back.”
MRS. CRAWFORD’S ASSEMBLY, held the next evening, boasted the same performers, for the most part, as had Mrs. Dunning’s, but had one novelty; it was there that I smelled myrtle candles for the first time.
“What is that lovely scent?” I asked Mrs. Crawford during the interval, sniffing at the candelabra that decorated her harpsichord. The candles were beeswax, but the scent was something both delicate and spicy—rather like bayberry, but lighter.
“Wax-myrtle,” she replied, gratified. “I don’t use them for the candles themselves, though one can—but it does take such a tremendous quantity of the berries, near eight pound to get only a pound of the wax, imagine! It took my bond-maid a week of picking, and she brought me barely