The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [675]
There it was, though, small, but black and solid on Jamie’s desk-table. He and Ian had spent the morning in his study, immersed in translation; when I joined him, I could tell by the way Jamie’s hair was sticking up that he had found the journal’s account either deeply absorbing, terribly upsetting—or possibly both.
“I’ve told them what it is,” he said without preamble, nodding toward Roger and Bree. The two of them sat close together on stools, looking solemn. Jemmy, having refused to be parted from his mother, was under the table, playing with a string of carved wooden beads.
“Have you read through the whole thing?” I asked, subsiding into the extra chair.
Jamie nodded, with a glance at Young Ian, who stood by the window, too restless to sit. His hair was cropped short, but nearly as disordered as Jamie’s.
“Aye, we have. I’m no going to read the whole thing aloud, but I thought I’d best start wi’ the bit where he’s made up his mind to put it all down from the beginning.”
He had marked the spot with the scrap of tanned leather he customarily used as a bookmark. Opening the journal, he found his spot and began to read.
“The name I was given at birth is Robert Springer. I reject this name, and all that goes with it, because it is the bitter fruit of centuries of murder and injustice, a symbol of theft, slavery, and oppression—”
Jamie looked up over the edge of the book, remarking, “Ye see why I dinna want to read every word; the man’s gey tedious about it.” Running a finger across the page, he resumed:
“In the year of Our Lord—their lord, that Christ in whose name they rape and pillage and—well, more of the same, but when he gets down to it, it was the year nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-eight. So I suppose ye’ll be familiar wi’ all this murder and pillage he’s talking about?” He raised his eyebrows at Bree and Roger.
Bree sat up abruptly, clutching Roger’s arm.
“I know that name,” she said, sounding breathless. “Robert Springer. I know it!”
“You knew him?” I asked, feeling a thrill of something—excitement, dread, or simple curiosity—run through me.
She shook her head.
“No, I didn’t know him, but I know the name—I saw it in the newspapers. Did you—?” She turned toward Roger, but he shook his head, frowning.
“Well, maybe you wouldn’t, in the UK, but it was a big deal in Boston. I think Robert Springer was one of the Montauk Five.”
Jamie pinched the bridge of his nose.
“The five what?”
“It was just a—a thing people did to call attention to themselves.” Brianna flapped a hand in dismissal. “It’s not important. They were AIM activists, or at least they started out that way, only they were even too nuts for AIM, and so—”
“Nuts? W’ere nuts?” Jemmy, picking the only word of personal interest out of this account, emerged from under the table.
“Not that kind of nuts, baby, sorry.” Looking around for some object of interest to distract him, Bree slipped off her silver bracelet and gave it to him. Seeing the puzzled looks on the faces of father and cousin, she took a deep breath and started over, trying—with occasional clarifications from Roger and me—to define things, and give a short, if confused, account of the sad state of the American Indian in the twentieth century.
“So this Robert Springer is—or was—an Indian, of sorts, in your own time?” Jamie tapped his fingers in a brief tattoo on the table, frowning in concentration. “Well, that corresponds wi’ his own account; he and his friends apparently took no little exception to the behavior of what they called ‘whites.’ I would suppose those to be Englishmen? Or Europeans, at least?”
“Well, yes—except that by nineteen sixty-eight, of course they weren’t Europeans anymore,