An Echo in the Bone (47 page)

“Jerry,” Roger said, his lips feeling numb. “My mother always called him Jerry.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “And there are circles of standing stones scattered all over Northumbria.”

“Near where the plane—”

“I don’t know. “ He saw the slight movement as she shrugged, helpless.

He closed his eyes and breathed deep, the air thick with the scent from the broken stems.

“And you’re telling me now because we’re going back,” he said, very calmly.

“I’ve been arguing with myself for weeks,” she said, sounding apologetic. “It was only a month or so ago that I remembered. I don’t often think about the—my—past, but what with everything

…” She waved a hand, encompassing their imminent departure and the intense discussions surrounding it. “I was just thinking of the War—I wonder if anyone who was in it ever thinks of it without a capital ‘W’—and telling Jamie about it.”

It was Jamie who had asked her about Frank. Wanted to know what role he had played in the war.

“He’s curious about Frank,” she said abruptly.

“I would be, too, under the circumstances,” Roger had replied dryly. “Was Frank not curious about him?”

That seemed to unsettle her, and she’d not replied directly but had pulled the conversation firmly back on track—if you could use such a word for such a conversation, he thought.

“Anyway,” she said, “it was that that reminded me of Frank’s letters. And I was trying to recall the things he’d written me about, when suddenly I remembered that one phrase—about Jeremiah being a name with a certain doom about it.” He heard her sigh.

“I wasn’t sure … but I talked to Jamie, and he said I should tell you. He says he thinks you’ve a right to know—and that you’d do the right thing with the knowledge.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. More like flattened.

“SO THAT’S IT.” The evening stars had begun to come out, faint over the mountains. Not as brilliant as the stars had been on the Ridge, where the mountain night came down like black velvet. They’d come back to the house by now, but lingered in the dooryard, talking.

“I’d thought about it, now and again: how does the time-traveling fit into God’s plan? Can things be changed?
Ought
they be changed? Your parents—they tried to change history, tried damned hard, and couldn’t do it. I’d thought that was all there was to it—and from a Presbyterian point of view.” He let a little humor show in his voice. “It was a comfort, almost, to think that it
couldn’t
change. It shouldn’t be able to be changed. Ye know:
God’s in His heaven, all’s right
with the world
sort of thing.”

“But.” Bree was holding the folded photocopy; she waved it at a passing moth, a tiny white blur.

“But,” he agreed. “Proof that things
can
be changed.”

“I talked to Mama a little bit about it,” Bree said, after a moment’s thought. “She laughed.”

“Did she?” Roger said dryly, and got the breath of a laugh from Bree in answer.

“Not like she thought it was funny,” she assured him. “I’d asked her if she thought it was possible for a traveler to change things, change the future, and she told me it was, obviously—because she changed the future every time she kept someone from dying who would have died if she hadn’t been there. Some of them went on to have children they wouldn’t have had, and who knew what those children would do, that they wouldn’t have done if they hadn’t … and
that
was when she laughed and said it was a good thing Catholics believed in Mystery and didn’t insist on trying to figure out exactly
how
God worked, like Protestants do.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’d say—oh, was she talking about me?”

“Probably. I didn’t ask.”

Now it was his turn to laugh, though it hurt his throat to do it.

“Proof,” she said thoughtfully. She was sitting on the bench near the front door, folding the photocopy in long, nervously deft fingers. “I don’t know.
Is
it proof?”

“Maybe not up to your rigorous engineering standards,” he said. “But I do remember—and so do you. If it was only me, then, yeah, I’d think it was just my mind going. But I’ve got a little more faith in
your
mental processes. Are you making a paper airplane out of that?”

“No, it’s—whoa. Mandy.” She was up and moving before he’d quite registered the wail from the nursery upstairs, and had vanished into the house a moment later, leaving him to lock up below.

They didn’t usually bother locking the doors—no one did, in the Highlands—but tonight …

His heart rate surged as a long gray shadow shot out across the path in front of him. Then dropped as he smiled. Wee Adso, out for a prowl. A neighbor boy had come round with a basket of kittens a few months before, looking for homes for them, and Bree had taken the gray one, a green-eyed ringer for her mother’s cat, and given it the same name. If they got a watchdog, would they name it Rollo? he wondered.

“Chat a Mhinister …”
he said.
The minister’s cat is a hunting cat
.

“Good hunting, then,” he added to the tail disappearing under the hydrangea bush, and bent to retrieve the half-folded paper from the path where Brianna had dropped it.

No, it wasn’t a paper airplane. What was it? A paper hat? No telling, and he tucked it into his shirt pocket and went in.

He found Bree and Mandy in the front parlor, in front of a freshly made fire. Mandy, comforted and given milk, had half-dozed off again already in Bree’s arms; she blinked sleepily at him, sucking on a thumb.

“Aye, what’s the trouble, then,
a leannan
?” he asked her softly, pushing tumbled curls out of her eyes.

“Bad dream,” Bree said, her voice carefully casual. “A naughty thing outside, trying to get in her window.”

He and Brianna had been sitting below that very window at the time, but he glanced reflexively at the window beside him, which reflected only the domestic scene of which he was a part. The man in the glass looked wary, shoulders hunched in readiness to lunge at something. He got up and drew the curtains.

“Here,” he said abruptly, sitting down and reaching for Mandy. She came into his arms with the slow amiability of a tree sloth, sticking her wet thumb in his ear in the process.

Bree went to fetch them cups of cocoa, returning with a rattle of crockery, the scent of hot milk and chocolate, and the look of someone who’s been thinking what to say about a difficult matter.

“Did you … I mean, given the nature of the, er, difficulty … did you maybe think of asking God?” she said, diffident. “Directly?”

“Yeah, I did think of that,” he assured her, torn between annoyance and amusement at the question. “And yes, I did ask—a number of times. Especially on the way to Oxford. Where I found that.” He nodded at the bit of paper. “What is it, by the way? The shape, I mean.”

“Oh.” She picked it up and made the last few folds, quick and sure, then held it out on the palm of her hand. He frowned at it for a moment, then realized what it was. A Chinese fortune-teller, kids called them; there were four pockets showing, and you put your fingers in them and could open the thing in different combinations as questions were asked, so as to show the different answers
—Yes, No, Sometimes, Always—
written on the flaps inside.

“Very appropriate,” he said.

They fell silent for a moment, drinking cocoa in a silence that balanced precariously on the edge of question.

“The Westminster Confession also says,
God alone is Lord of the conscience
. I’ll make my peace with it,” he said quietly, at last, “or I won’t. I said to Dr. Weatherspoon that it seemed a bit odd, having an assistant choirmaster who couldn’t sing—he just smiled and said he was wanting me to take the job so as to keep me in the fold while I thought things over, as he put it. Probably afraid I’d jump ship else, and go over to Rome,” he added, as a feeble joke.

“That’s good,” she said softly, not looking up from the depths of the cocoa she wasn’t drinking.

More silence. And the shade of Jerry MacKenzie, RAF, came and sat down by the fire in his fleece-lined leather flight jacket, watching the play of light in his granddaughter’s ink-black hair.

“So you—” He could hear the little pop as her tongue parted from her dry mouth. “You’re going to look? See if you can find out where your father went? Where he might … be?”

Where he might be. Here, there, then, now?
His heart gave a sudden convulsive lurch, thinking of the tramp who’d stayed in the broch. God … no. It couldn’t be. No reason to think it, none.

Only wanting.

He’d thought about it a lot, on the way to Oxford, between the praying. What he’d say, what he’d ask, if he had the chance. He wanted to ask everything, say everything—but there really was only the one thing to say to his father, and that thing was snoring in his arms like a drunken bumblebee.

“No.” Mandy squirmed in her sleep, emitted a small burp, and settled back against his chest. He didn’t look up, but kept his eyes fixed in the dark labyrinth of her curls. “I couldn’t risk my own kids losing their father.” His voice had nearly disappeared; he felt his vocal cords grinding like gears to force the words out.

“It’s too important. You don’t forget having a dad.”

Bree’s eyes slid sideways, the blue of them no more than a spark in the firelight.

“I thought … you were so young. You do remember your father?”

Roger shook his head, the chambers of his heart clenching hard, grasping emptiness.

“No,” he said softly, and bent his head, breathing in the scent of his daughter’s hair. “I remember yours.”

FLUTTERBY

Wilmington, colony of North Carolina

May 3, 1777

I COULD SEE AT ONCE that Jamie had been dreaming again. His face had an unfocused, inward look, as though he were seeing something other than the fried black pudding on his plate.

Seeing him like this gave me an urgent desire to ask what he had seen—quelled at once, for fear that if I asked too soon, he might lose some part of the dream. It also, truth be told, knotted me with envy. I would have given anything to see what he saw, whether it was real or not. That hardly mattered—it was connection, and the severed nerve ends that had joined me to my vanished family sparked and burned like shorted-out electrical cables when I saw that look on his face.

I couldn’t stand not to know what he had dreamed, though in the usual manner of dreams, it was seldom straightforward.

“You’ve been dreaming of them, haven’t you?” I said, when the serving maid had gone out.

We’d risen late, tired from the long ride to Wilmington the day before, and were the only diners in the inn’s small front room.

He glanced at me and nodded slowly, a small frown between his brows.
That made
me uneasy; the occasional dreams he had of Bree or the children normally left him peaceful and happy.

“What?” I demanded. “What happened?”

He shrugged, still frowning.

“Nothing, Sassenach. I saw Jem and the wee lass—” A smile came over his face at that. “God, she’s a feisty wee baggage! She minds me o’ you, Sassenach.”

This was a dubious compliment as phrased, but I felt a deep glow at the thought. I’d spent hours looking at Mandy and Jem, memorizing every small feature and gesture, trying to extrapolate, imagine what they would look like as they grew—and I was almost sure that Mandy had my mouth. I knew for a fact that she had the shape of my eyes—and my hair, poor child, for all it was inky black.

“What were they doing?”

He rubbed a finger between his brows as though his forehead itched.

“They were outside,” he said slowly. “Jem told her to do something and she kicked him in the shin and ran away from him, so he chased her. I think it was spring.” He smiled, eyes fixed on whatever he’d seen in his dream. “I mind the wee flowers, caught in her hair, and lying in drifts across the stones.”

“What stones?” I asked sharply.

“Oh. The gravestones,” he answered, readily enough. “That’s it—they were playing among the stones on the hill behind Lallybroch.”

I sighed happily. This was the third dream that he’d had, seeing them at Lallybroch. It might be only wishful thinking, but I knew it made him as happy as it made me, to feel that they had made a home there.

“They could be,” I said. “Roger went there—when we were looking for you. He said the place was standing vacant, for sale. Bree would have money; they might have bought it. They
could
be there!” I’d told him that before, but he nodded, pleased.

“Aye, they could be,” he said, his eyes still soft with his memory of the children on the hill, chasing through the long grass and the worn gray stones that marked his family’s rest.

“A flutterby came with them,” he said suddenly. “I’d forgot that. A blue one.”

“Blue? Are there blue butterflies in Scotland?” I frowned, trying to remember. Such butterflies as I’d ever noticed had tended to be white or yellow, I thought.

Jamie gave me a look of mild exasperation.

“It’s a dream, Sassenach. I could have flutterbys wi’ tartan wings, and I liked.”

I laughed, but refused to be distracted.

“Right. What was it that bothered you, though?”

He glanced curiously at me.

“How did ye ken I was troubled?”

I looked at him down my nose—or as much down my nose as was possible, given the disparity of height.

“You may not have a glass face, but I
have
been married to you for thirty-odd years.”

He let the fact that I hadn’t actually been
with
him for twenty of those years pass without comment, and only smiled.

“Aye. Well, it wasna anything, really. Only that they went into the broch.”

“The broch?” I said uncertainly. The ancient tower for which Lallybroch was named did stand on the hill behind the house, its shadow passing daily through the burying ground like the stately march of a giant sundial. Jamie and I had gone up there often of an evening in our early days at Lallybroch, to sit on the bench that stood against the broch’s wall and be away from the hubbub of the house, enjoying the peaceful sight of the estate and its grounds spread white and green below us, soft with twilight.