The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [41]
Staggered by this revelation, Claire’s shock is succeeded by fury. Stunned and dismayed by news of the marriage, she is infuriated by Jamie’s failure to tell her of it. He intended to tell her, he insists—but was afraid that her reaction would be exactly what it is. There is a dreadful fight, concluding with Jamie’s stamping out of the house–and Claire’s flight away from Lallybroch and back toward the stones.
Her steps grow slower and slower, though, as she approaches the end of her dreams.
Only with Jamie had I given everything I had, risked it all. I had thrown away caution and judgment and wisdom, along with the comforts and constraints of a hard-won career. I had brought him nothing but myself, been nothing but myself with him, given him soul as well as body, let him see me naked, trusted him to see me whole and cherish my frailties—because he once had.
I had feared he couldn’t, again. Or wouldn’t. And then had known those few days of perfect joy, thinking that what had once been true was true once more; I was free to love him, with everything I had and was, and be loved with an honesty that matched my own.
The tears slid hot and wet between my fingers. I mourned for Jamie, and for what I had been, with him.
Do you know, his voice said, whispering, what it means, to say again “I love you,” and to mean it?
I knew. And with my head in my hands beneath the pine trees, I knew I would never mean it again.
Sunk in miserable contemplation, Claire is suddenly roused by the unexpected appearance of Young Ian. He has, he says, been sent by Jamie to ask Claire to come back to Lallybroch. Further infuriated by this evidence of Jamie’s callousness—he doesn’t care enough to come himself!—Claire indignantly refuses, trying to free her horse’s reins from Young Ian’s stubborn grip.
But she must come, he insists. It’s not like she thinks; Jamie really needs her. “Let go!”
“But Auntie Claire, it’s not that!”
“What’s not that?” Caught by his tone of desperation, I glanced up. His long narrow face was tight with the anguished need to make me understand.
“Uncle Jamie didna stay to tend Laoghaire!”
“Then why did he send you?”
He took a deep breath, renewing his grip on my reins.
“She shot him. He sent me to find ye, because he’s dying.”
Claire’s initial response to this revelation is, “If he isn’t dying when I get there, I’ll kill him myself—and you, too, Ian Murray!” but this doesn’t lessen her anxiety as they hasten back toward Lallybroch. Upon arrival there, she finds Jamie battling infection and high fever, groggy enough with pain and heat to think her appearance a hallucination. He has, he tells her, come close to death from fever twice before; this time it will finish him, and is welcome to do so.
Claire, however, has brought one other thing from the future besides Brianna’s photographs; a small case, holding hypodermic syringes and penicillin tablets. Informing Jamie that eighteenth-century germs are no match for a modern antibiotic, she tends briskly to his wounds, injects him with the drug, and then sits down to watch over him—at last reluctantly ready to hear what he had tried to tell her before: the story behind his marriage to Laoghaire.
It was a marriage made of loneliness; a mismatch born of hope and compassion. Jenny, fearing for her brother’s sanity and aching for his need, had tried again and again to induce him to take a wife after Claire’s disappearance. He had refused, again and again—not only because no one could replace her, but because his circumstances did not admit of taking a wife; living in a cave, hiding, endlessly on the run—what sort of life could that be for any woman?
But now … returning from his long exile in England, he found himself free of the threat of law, but rootless, a stranger in his own place. The estate had passed to Ian’s son; the responsibility