Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [171]
He snorted. “Well, I damn nearly didn’t. I was all but dead when they pulled me out of the wagon at Lallybroch.” His face darkened with memory.
“God, sometimes I wake up in the night, dreaming of that wagon. It was two days’ journey, and I was fevered or chilled, or both together. I was covered wi’ hay, and the ends of it sticking in my eyes and my ears and through my shirt, and fleas hopping all through it and eating me alive, and my leg killing me at every jolt in the road. It was a verra bumpy road, too,” he added broodingly.
“It sounds horrible,” I said, feeling the word quite inadequate. He snorted briefly.
“Aye. I only stood it by imagining what I’d do to Melton if I ever met him again, to get back at him for not shooting me.”
I laughed again, and he glanced down at me, a wry smile on his lips.
“I’m not laughing because it’s funny,” I said, gulping a little. “I’m laughing because otherwise I’ll cry, and I don’t want to—not now, when it’s over.”
“Aye, I know.” He squeezed my hand.
I took a deep breath. “I—I didn’t look back. I didn’t think I could stand to find out—what happened.” I bit my lip; the admission seemed a betrayal. “It wasn’t that I tried—that I wanted—to forget,” I said, groping clumsily for words. “I couldn’t forget you; you shouldn’t think that. Not ever. But I—”
“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach,” he interrupted. He patted my hand gently. “I ken what ye mean. I try not to look back myself, come to that.”
“But if I had,” I said, staring down at the smooth grain of the linen, “if I had—I might have found you sooner.”
The words hung in the air between us like an accusation, a reminder of the bitter years of loss and separation. Finally he sighed, deeply, and put a finger under my chin, lifting my face to his.
“And if ye had?” he said. “Would ye have left the lassie there without her mother? Or come to me in the time after Culloden, when I couldna care for ye, but only watch ye suffer wi’ the rest, and feel the guilt of bringing ye to such a fate? Maybe see ye die of the hunger and sickness, and know I’d killed ye?” He raised one eyebrow in question, then shook his head.
“No. I told ye to go, and I told ye to forget. Shall I blame ye for doing as I said, Sassenach? No.”
“But we might have had more time!” I said. “We might have—” He stopped me by the simple expedient of bending and putting his mouth on mine. It was warm and very soft, and the stubble of his face was faintly scratchy on my skin.
After a moment he released me. The light was growing, putting color in his face. His skin glowed bronze, sparked with the copper of his beard. He took a deep breath.
“Aye, we might. But to think of that—we cannot.” His eyes met mine steadily, searching. “I canna look back, Sassenach, and live,” he said simply. “If we have no more than last night, and this moment, it is enough.”
“Not for me, it isn’t!” I said, and he laughed.
“Greedy wee thing, are ye no?”
“Yes,” I said. The tension broken, I returned my attention to the scar on his leg, to keep away for the moment from the painful contemplation of lost time and opportunity.
“You were telling me how you got that.”
“So I was.” He rocked back a little, squinting down at the thin white line down the top of his thigh.
“Well, it was Jenny—my sister, ye ken?” I did indeed remember Jenny; half her brother’s size, and dark as he was blazing fair, but a match and more for him in stubbornness.
“She said she wasna going to let me die,” he said, with a rueful smile. “And she didn’t. My opinion didna seem to have anything to do wi’ the matter, so she didna bother to ask me.”
“That sounds like Jenny.” I felt a small glow of comfort at the thought of my sister-in-law. Jamie hadn’t been alone as I feared, then; Jenny Murray would have fought the Devil himself to save her brother—and evidently had.
“She dosed me for the fever, and put poultices on my leg to draw the poison,