The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [61]
“If she goes on wi’ the history—d’ye think she’ll find us? Written down somewhere, I mean?”
The thought had honestly not occurred to me, and for a moment I lay quite still. Then I stretched a bit, and laid my head on his shoulder with a small laugh, not altogether humorous.
“I shouldn’t think so. Not unless we were to do something newsworthy.” I gestured vaguely toward the cabin wall and the endless wilderness outside. “Not much chance of that here, I don’t imagine. And she’d have to be deliberately looking, in any case.”
“Would she?”
I was silent for a moment, breathing the musky, deep scent of him.
“I hope not,” I said quietly, at last. “She should have her own life—not spend her time looking back.” The fire crackled softly to itself casting red and yellow highlights on the wooden walls of our snug refuge, and we lay in quiet peace, not bothering to sort out whose limbs were whose. On the very verge of sleep, I felt Jamie’s breath, warm on my neck.
“She’ll look,” he said, with certainty.
BRIANNA IS LOOKING, searching history for traces of her parents, seeking identity and reassurance. Roger, unsure of her wisdom and afraid of what she might find, still is helping with the search, understanding her need as only a man raised without a father could.
Roger’s fears are borne out, though, when he discovers a small announcement in an eighteenth-century newspaper, reporting the deaths by fire of one James Fraser and his wife, Claire, in North Carolina in 1776. Shocked and grieved himself, he hesitates to show the clipping to Brianna—not only out of reluctance to hurt her, but from a deeper fear; there is still time. If Brianna were to risk the journey through the standing stones, she might reach her parents before the date of the fire. If he tells her what he has found, she may well insist on going, whether in an attempt to save them—or only to seize the last chance of seeing the father she has never known.
Roger is himself convinced that history cannot change; Brianna cannot save her parents or alter their fate. He understands an orphan’s longing for knowledge and connection, all too well. If she goes through the stones, though, she may be lost to him forever. Wracked by pangs of guilt, Roger reaches his conclusion; he will not show Brianna the announcement. Lest she find it herself, he makes up his mind that he must now try to dissuade her gently from her search, telling her that he has found nothing, trying to persuade her, bit by bit, that it is both fruitless and unhealthy to look backward too much; better that she turn her thoughts to the future— with him.
But knowledge once gained cannot be unlearned, and Roger cannot turn his own thoughts so easily away from his visions of fire and haunting loneliness.
ON FRASER’S RIDGE, the tiny homestead is slowly prospering and Claire’s reputation as a healer is spreading to the far-flung farms of the nearby countryside. She makes her medical rounds on horseback, traveling—mostly—unafraid through the mountains. The wilderness has its dangers, though; returning from attendance at a birth, she is thrown from her horse during a thunderstorm and stranded miles from anywhere, lost, wet, and completely alone.
Taking refuge from the storm beneath the upflung roots of a giant red cedar that has toppled in the wind, she sinks into the troubled sleep of cold, hunger, and exhaustion, waking to a sense of someone nearby. Searching in the darkness for her shoes, she makes instead a bizarre discovery: a buried skull, and with it a smooth rock with an incised petroglyph. More disturbing still, the skull shows clear evidence of violence; the man—whoever he was— had been beheaded.
Waiting out the hours of the night, with nothing but this macabre companion, she sees a light coming down the slope toward her refuge.
THERE WAS A LIGHT on the ridge. A small spark, growing to a flame. At first I thought