The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [77]
To my surprise, Roger didn’t look at Brianna, or reach for her hand. Instead, he swiped his thumb across his bleeding wrist, and stepped close to her, eyes on the baby. Roger knelt in front of her, and reaching out, pushed the shawl aside and smeared a broad red cross upon the downy curve of the baby’s forehead.
“You are blood of my blood,” he said softly, “and bone of my bone. I claim thee as my son before all men, from this day forever.”
But nearly a year has passed since the night when Roger and Brianna took each other for better or for worse, and who can say which of them has changed the most in the time since then? Unsure whether Roger has come back only from obligation, or because he truly loves her, Brianna is hesitant.
Jamie decrees that Roger will stay; they are married, if only by handfasting. However, the traditional span of handfasting is for a year and a day. Roger has that long to convince his wife of his motives; Brianna has that long to make up her mind. In the meantime, they will live as husband and wife—though if Roger seeks to sleep with Brianna against her will, Jamie asserts that he will cut out Roger’s heart and feed it to the pig.
For his part, Roger is more than willing to try to convince Brianna of his devotion —the difficulty is getting to talk to her for more than a few moments at a time, with the interruptions caused by the baby, and the fact that Roger is temporarily immobilized by Claire’s treatment of his foot injury. One night, though, he comes to Brianna’s cabin, and forces her to listen to him.
Be careful, her mother said, and my daughter doesna need a coward, said her father. He could flip a bloody coin, but for the moment he was taking Jamie Frasers advice, and damn the torpedoes.
“You said you’d seen a marriage of obligation and one of love. And do you think the one cuts out the other? Look—I spent three days in that godforsaken circle, thinking. And by God, I thought. I thought of staying, and I thought of going. And I stayed.”
“We have time,” he said softly, and knew suddenly why it had been so important to talk to her now, here in the dark. He reached for her hand, clasped it flat against his breast.
“Do you feel it? Do you feel my heart beat?”
“Yes,” she whispered, and slowly brought their linked hands to her own breast, pressing his palm against the thin white gauze.
“This is our time,” he said. “Until that shall stop—for one of us, for both—it is our time. Now. Will ye waste it, Brianna, because you are afraid?”
“No,” she said, and her voice was thick, but clear. “I won’t.”
There was a sudden thin wail from the house, and a surprising gush of moist heat against his palm.
“I have to go,” she said, pulling away. She took two steps, then turned. “Come in,” she said, and ran up the path in front of him, fleet and white as the ghost of a deer.
AT THE END of October 1770, the Frasers go to the great Gathering on Mount Helicon—the largest Gathering of Scots in the New World. Here marriages are made, children are christened, news is exchanged, and business is done.
The new baby will be christened here— if Roger and Brianna can ever agree on a name for him. Jeremiah, Roger suggests; it is an old family name. In fact, his father’s first name was Jeremiah, and it is Roger’s middle name—his mother once called him “Jemmy,” for short. It is the memory of this nickname that brings back to Roger other memories, of the days of terror on the Gloriana, with his vivid images of the woman, Morag MacKenzie, and her child—named Jemmy—whom he helped to save.
With a disturbing notion blossoming in his brain, Roger asks Claire whether she perhaps recalls the details of his own genealogical record—she had examined it in some detail. She does, she replies; why? Does she also recall, he asks carefully, the name of the woman who married William Buccleigh MacKenzie—the “changeling,” the illegitimate child born to Dougal MacKenzie and the witch Geillis Duncan? Indeed she does,