A Breath of Snow and Ashes (82 page)

“Aye, I think I mean to give Bird the muskets,” he said. “Though I may have cause to regret it, and I find them pointing at me, two or three years hence. But he shall have them, and do with them what seems best, to defend himself and his people.”

“The price of honor, is it?”

He looked down at me, with the ghost of a smile.

“Call it blood money.”

54

FLORA MACDONALD’S
BARBECUE

River Run Plantation
August 6, 1774

W
HATEVER DID ONE SAY to an icon? Or an icon’s husband, for that matter?

“Oh, I shall faint, I know I shall.” Rachel Campbell was fluttering her fan hard enough to create a perceptible breeze. “Whatever shall I say to her?”

“‘Good day, Mrs. MacDonald’?” suggested her husband, a faint smile lurking at the corner of his withered mouth.

Rachel hit him sharply with her fan, making him chuckle as he dodged away. For all he was thirty-five years her senior, Farquard Campbell had an easy, teasing way with his wife, quite at odds with his usual dignified demeanor.

“I shall faint,” Rachel declared again, having evidently decided upon this as a definite social strategy.

“Well, ye must please yourself, of course,
a nighean,
but if ye do, it will have to be Mr. Fraser picking you up from the ground; my ancient limbs are scarcely equal to the task.”

“Oh!” Rachel cast a quick glance at Jamie, who smiled at her, then hid her blushes behind her fan. While plainly fond of her own husband, she made no secret of her admiration for mine.

“Your humble servant, madam,” Jamie gravely assured her, bowing.

She tittered. I shouldn’t like to wrong the woman, but she definitely tittered. I caught Jamie’s eye, and hid a smile behind my own fan.

“And what will
you
say to her, then, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie pursed his lips and squinted thoughtfully at the brilliant sun streaming through the elm trees that edged the lawn at River Run.

“Oh, I suppose I might say that I’m glad the weather has kept fine for her. It was raining the last time we met.”

Rachel’s jaw dropped, and so did her fan, bouncing on the lawn. Her husband bent to pick it up for her, groaning audibly, but she had no attention to spare for him.

“You’ve
met
her?” she cried, eyes wide with excitement. “When? Where? With the prin—with
him
?”

“Ah, no,” Jamie said, smiling. “On Skye. I’d gone wi’ my father—a matter of sheep, it was. We chanced to meet Hugh MacDonald of Armadale in Portree—Miss Flora’s stepfather, aye?—and he’d brought the lass into the town with him, for a treat.”

“Oh!” Rachel was enchanted. “And was she beautiful and gracious as they say?”

Jamie frowned, considering.

“Well, no,” he said. “But she’d a terrible grippe at the time, and no doubt would have looked much improved without the red nose. Gracious? Well, I wouldna say so, really. She snatched a bridie right out of my hand and ate it.”

“And how old were you both at the time?” I asked, seeing Rachel’s mouth sag in horror.

“Oh, six, maybe,” he said cheerfully. “Or seven. I doubt I should remember, save I kicked her in the shin when she stole my bridie, and she pulled my hair.”

Recovering somewhat from the shock, Rachel was pressing Jamie for further reminiscences, a pressure he was laughingly deflecting with jokes.

Of course, he had come prepared to this occasion; all over the grounds, there were stories being exchanged—humorous, admiring, longing—of the days before Culloden. Odd, that it should have been the defeat of Charles Stuart, and his ignominious flight, that made a heroine of Flora MacDonald and united these Highland exiles in a way that they could never have achieved—let alone sustained—had he actually won.

It struck me suddenly that Charlie was likely still alive, quietly drinking himself to death in Rome. In any real way, though, he was long since dead to these people who had loved or hated him. The amber of time had sealed him forever in that one defining moment of his life—
Bliadha Tearlach;
“Charlie’s Year,” it meant, and even now, I heard people call it that.

It was Flora’s coming that was causing this flood of sentiment, of course. How strange for her, I thought, with a pang of sympathy—and for the first time, wondered what on earth I might say to her myself.

I had met famous people before—not the least of them the Bonnie Prince himself. But always before, I had met them when they—and I—were in the midst of their normal lives, not yet past the defining events that would make them famous, and thus still just people. Bar Louis—but then, he was a king. There are rules of etiquette for dealing with kings, since after all, no one ever does approach them as normal people. Not even when—

I snapped my own fan open, hot blood bursting through my face and body. I breathed deeply, trying not to fan quite as frantically as Rachel, but wanting to.

I had not once, in all the years since it happened, ever specifically recalled those two or three minutes of physical intimacy with Louis of France. Not deliberately, God knew, and not by accident, either.

Yet suddenly, the memory of it had touched me, as suddenly as a hand coming out of the crowd to seize my arm. Seize my arm, lift my skirts, and penetrate me in a way much more shockingly intrusive than the actual experience had been.

The air around me was suffused with the scent of roses, and I heard the creak of the dress cage as Louis’s weight pressed upon it, and heard his sigh of pleasure. The room was dark, lit by one candle; it flickered at the edge of vision, then was blotted out by the man between my—

“Christ, Claire! Are ye all right?” I hadn’t actually fallen down, thank God. I had reeled back against the wall of Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, and Jamie, seeing me go, had leapt forward to catch hold of me.

“Let go,” I said, breathless, but imperative. “Let go of me!”

He heard the note of terror in my voice, and slackened his grip, but couldn’t bring himself to let go altogether, lest I fall. With the energy of sheer panic, I pulled myself upright, out of his grasp.

I still smelled roses. Not the cloying scent of rose oil—fresh roses. Then I came to myself, and realized that I was standing next to a huge yellow brier rose, trained to climb over the white marble of the mausoleum.

Knowing that the roses were real was comforting, but I felt as though I stood still on the edge of a vast abyss, alone, separate from every other soul in the universe. Jamie was close enough to touch, and yet it was as though he stood an immeasurable distance away.

Then he touched me and spoke my name, insistently, and just as suddenly as it had opened, the gap between us closed. I nearly fell into his arms.

“What is it,
a nighean
?” he whispered, holding me against his chest. “What’s frightened ye?” His own heart was thumping under my ear; I’d scared him, too.

“Nothing,” I said, and an overwhelming wave of relief went over me, at the realization that I was safely in the present; Louis had gone back into the shadows, an unpleasant but harmless memory once more. The staggering sense of violation, of loss and grief and isolation, had receded, no more than a shadow on my mind. Best of all, Jamie was there; solid and physical and smelling of sweat and whisky and horses . . . and
there.
I hadn’t lost him.

Other people were clustering round, curious, solicitous. Rachel fanned me earnestly, and the breeze of it felt soothing; I was drenched with sweat, wisps of hair clinging damply to my neck.

“Quite all right,” I murmured, suddenly self-conscious. “Just a bit faint . . . hot day . . .”

A chorus of offers to fetch me wine, a glass of syllabub, lemon shrub, a burned feather, were all trumped by Jamie’s production of a flask of whisky from his sporran. It was the three-year-old stuff, from the sherry casks, and I felt a qualm as the scent of it reached me, remembering the night we had got drunk together after he had rescued me from Hodgepile and his men. God, was I about to be hurled back into
that
pit?

But I wasn’t. The whisky was merely hot and consoling, and I felt better with the first sip.

Flashback.
I’d heard colleagues talk about it, arguing as to whether this was the same phenomenon as shell shock, and if it was, whether it truly existed, or should be dismissed as simply “nerves.”

I shuddered briefly, and took another sip. It most assuredly existed. I felt much better, but I had been shaken to the core, and my bones still felt watery. Beyond the faint echoes of the experience itself was a much more unsettling thought. It had happened once before, when Ute McGillivray attacked me. Was it likely to happen again?

“Shall I carry ye inside, Sassenach? Perhaps ye should lie down a bit.”

Jamie had shooed away the well-wishers, had a slave fetch me a stool, and was now hovering over me like an anxious bumblebee.

“No, I’m all right now,” I assured him. “Jamie . . .”

“Aye, lass?”

“You—when you—do you . . .”

I took a deep breath—and another sip of whisky—and tried again.

“Sometimes, I wake up during the night and see you—struggling—and I think it’s with Jack Randall. Is it a dream that you have?”

He stared down at me for a moment, face blank, but trouble moving in his eyes. He glanced from side to side, but we were quite alone now.

“Why?” he asked, low-voiced.

“I need to know.”

He took a breath, swallowed, and nodded.

“Aye. Sometimes it’s dreams. That’s . . . all right. I wake, and ken where I am, say a wee prayer, and . . . it’s all right. But now and then—” He shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “I
am
awake. And yet I am there, with Jack Randall.”

“Ah.” I sighed, feeling at once terribly sad for him, and at the same time somewhat reassured. “Then I’m not losing my mind.”

“Ye think so?” he said dryly. “Well, I’m that glad to hear it, Sassenach.”

He stood very close, the cloth of his kilt brushing my arm, so that I should have him for support, if I suddenly went faint again. He looked searchingly at me, to be sure that I wasn’t going to keel over, then touched my shoulder and with a brief “Sit still” went off.

Not far; just to the tables set up under the trees at the edge of the lawn. Ignoring the slaves arranging food for the barbecue, he leaned across a platter of boiled crayfish and picked up something from a tiny bowl. Then he was back, leaning down to take my hand. He rubbed his fingers together, and a pinch of salt sprinkled into my open palm.

“There,” he whispered. “Keep it by ye, Sassenach. Whoever it is, he’ll trouble ye no more.”

I closed my hand over the damp grains, feeling absurdly comforted. Trust a Highlander to know precisely what to do about a case of daylight haunting! Salt, they said, kept a ghost in its grave. And if Louis was still alive, the other man, whoever he had been, that pressing weight in the dark, was surely dead.

There was a sudden rush of excitement, as a call came from the river—the boat had been sighted. As one, the crowd drew itself up on tiptoe, breathless with anticipation.

I smiled, but felt the giddy contagion of it touch me nonetheless. Then the pipes began to skirl, and my throat at once was tight with unshed tears.

Jamie’s hand tightened on my shoulder, unconsciously, and I looked up to see him rub his knuckles hard across his upper lip, as he, too, turned toward the river.

I looked down, blinking to control myself, and as my vision cleared, I saw the grains of salt on the ground, carefully scattered before the gates of the mausoleum.

SHE WAS MUCH SMALLER than I’d thought. Famous people always are. Everyone—dressed in their best, and an absolute sea of tartan—pressed close, awed past courtesy. I caught a glimpse of the top of her head, dark hair dressed high with white roses, and then it disappeared behind the thronged backs of well-wishers.

Her husband, Allan, was visible. A stoutly handsome man with gray-streaked black hair tied neatly back, he was standing—I assumed—behind her, bowing and smiling, acknowledging the flood of Gaelic compliment and welcome.

Despite myself, I felt the urge to rush forward and stare, with everyone else. I held firm, though. I was standing with Jocasta on the terrace; Mrs. MacDonald would come to us.

Sure enough; Jamie and Duncan were pushing their way firmly through the crowd, forming a flying wedge with Jocasta’s black butler, Ulysses.

“That’s really her?” Brianna murmured at my shoulder, eyes fixed with interest on the seething multitude, from which the men had now extracted the guest of honor, escorting her from the dock, up the lawn, toward the terrace. “She’s smaller than I thought. Oh, it’s too bad Roger isn’t here—he’d just die to see her!” Roger was spending a month at the Presbyterian Academy at Charlotte, having his qualifications for ordination examined.