The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [192]
Jamie turned over, wriggling deeper into the nest of blankets, drowsy, remembering. He’d kept it up, the wean had, back and forth, back and forth, though red in the face and panting, until he dropped the very last branch on the pile. Jamie had looked down to find Willie beaming up at him with pride, laughed, and said on impulse, “Aye, that’s a bonnie lad. Come on. Let’s go home.”
William had fallen asleep on the ride home, his head heavy as a cannonball in its woolen cap against Jamie’s chest. Jamie had dismounted carefully, holding the child in one arm, but Willie had wakened, blinked groggily at Jamie, and said, “WEN-sess-loss,” clear as a bell, then fallen promptly back asleep. He’d waked properly by the time he was handed over to Nanny Elspeth, though, and as Jamie walked away, he had heard Willie, as he walked away, telling Nanny, “I a bonnie lad!”
But those words came out of his dreams from somewhere else, and long ago. Had his own father said that to him once?
He thought so, and for an instant—just an instant—was with his father and his brother, Willie, excited beyond bearing, holding the first fish he’d ever caught by himself, slimy and flapping, both of them laughing at him, with him in joy. “Bonnie lad!”
Willie. God, Willie. I’m so glad they gave him your name. He seldom thought of his brother, but every now and then, he could feel Willie with him; sometimes his mother or his father. More often, Claire.
I wish ye could see him, Sassenach, he thought. He’s a bonnie lad. Loud and obnoxious, he added with honesty, but bonnie.
What would his own parents think of William? They had neither of them lived to see any of their children’s children.
He lay for some time, his throat aching, listening to the dark, hearing the voices of his dead pass by in the wind. His thoughts grew vague and his grief eased, comforted by the knowledge of love, still alive in the world. Sleep came near again.
He touched the rough crucifix that lay against his chest and whispered to the moving air, “Lord, that she might be safe, she and my children.”
Then turned his cheek to her reaching hand and touched her through the veils of time.
Author’s Notes
The Wild Hunt
The concept of the Wild Hunt—a spectral horde seen rushing through the night skies or above the ground, hunting for things unknown—doesn’t come from Celtic mythology but from that of Central/Northern/Western Europe. Celtic mythology being the very plastic and inclusive thing that it is (vide the way it historically entwined itself easily with Catholic theology in Scotland and Ireland, where people might say a prayer to St. Bride in one breath, and a charm against piskies in the next)—and the inability of any Celt to pass up a good story—and it’s no wonder that you find variations on the Wild Hunt in the Celtic lands as well.
In some forms of these stories, the horde consists of faeries, in others, the “hunt” consists of the souls of the dead. Either way, it isn’t something you want to meet on a dark night—or a moonlit one, either. In the British forms, the best-known “wild hunt” tales are “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer” (there are dozens of variations), in which a young man meets the Queen of Faerie and is more or less abducted by her.
The notion of abduction of humans by the hunt is common to almost all hunt tales, though—and it may be this aspect that caused our Irish Jacobite plotters to adopt this nom de guerre, as they planned to abduct George II. Then again, it might have been a reference to and natural extension from the older name, “Wild Geese,” as the Irish Jacobites of the late seventeenth century called themselves. The idea of the teind—the tithe to hell—is from “Tam Lin,” and likely a word that