The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [63]
BACK IN THE FUTURE, Roger is grimly wrestling with his own mysteries; his campaign of discouragement is bearing sour fruit. Brianna’s letters keep coming, but the tone is changed—friendly, but increasingly distant. Has his attempt to keep her from looking for her parents succeeded only in driving her away from him?
ON FRASER’S RIDGE, the peace of daily life has been disrupted; first, by the arrival of a Tuscaroran hunting party, one of whose members is ill with measles, and then by the appearance of a rattlesnake in the privy. Such mundane considerations are overshadowed, however, by another unexpected arrival—Lord John Grey and his son, William.
Or rather, his stepson. The boy is the son of his wife’s dead sister and the late Earl of Ellesmere. William is now Viscount Ashness, ninth Earl of Ellesmere— so far as the world is concerned.
Claire is shocked, both by the boy’s appearance—(He did look quite a bit like Jamie, but it was my memories of Brianna that had caused that instant jolt of recognition when I saw him. Only ten years her junior, the childish outlines of his face were much more similar to hers than to Jamie’s)—and by his presence. What has possessed Grey to bring the boy here? For that matter, what is Grey himself doing here?
Grey’s explanation is plausible enough; his wife, Isobel, en route to join him in Jamaica, has died aboard ship. In consequence of her death, Grey had decided not to remain in Jamaica, but to take Willie— naturally much distressed by the loss of his mother—to Virginia, where his late wife had property. Grey must decide what to do with the property, and hoped that the diversions of the journey might distract William from his grief.
Claire is not convinced by this; even if it is, as Grey claims, no more than a slight diversion to visit Fraser’s Ridge, it involves some risk. What if William remembers a groom named MacKenzie—or worse, notices the resemblance that is so clear to Claire? While Grey might possibly have meant only to allow Jamie a glimpse of his son, she thinks it much more likely that his purpose is more personal. “Always difficult to harbor warm feelings for a man with a professed homosexual passion for one’s husband, after all,” as she says.
The visit is uneventful, though, until the Indian in the corncrib dies of his illness. Beyond natural distress at the event, his death presents the Frasers with a delicate problem: how to inform his people of his demise. Claire insists that they cannot take the body to his people for burial; to do so would risk infecting them. But to bury it themselves might arouse suspicion that the Frasers have had a hand in his death, and are concealing it.
The problem is both compounded and resolved by Lord John’s coming down with measles himself. William cannot be exposed to the illness, Claire says; best for Jamie to take the boy with him to the Tuscarora village. Jamie can enlist Nacognaweto’s help in informing the dead man’s family of his death, and at the same time, remove Willie from danger. The fact that this plan would also give Jamie a few days in the company of his son is one that passes unremarked—though not unnoticed.
Willie objects fiercely to leaving his beloved stepfather, desperately afraid that John Grey will die, too—like both his mothers, and like the Indian in the corn-crib, whose death Willie has witnessed. Still, he is obliged to go with Jamie, and the two establish wary respect and a tentative liking for each other on the journey— as much, Jamie thinks, as he may ever have with this boy, and a gift for which he is grateful; or tries to be.
It wasn’t stubbornness, or even loyalty, that had made Willie insist on staying at the Ridge. It was love of John Grey, and fear of his loss. And it was the same love that made the boy weep in the night, desperate with worry for his father.
An unaccustomed weed of jealousy sprang up in Jamie’s heart, stinging like nettles. He stamped firmly on it; he was fortunate indeed to know that his son enjoyed a loving