Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (33 page)

“What do you mean?” I was on edge, and it showed in my voice. “You did trust him, didn't you? With—us. Me and Brianna.”

“I hadn't a choice about that, aye? Now I do.” He straightened, rubbing his palms together, and the last fragments of peanut skin whirled away in the strengthening wind.

I drew a deep breath to keep my voice from shaking, and brushed bits of shell off my bodice. “Now you do? You mean you're wondering whether you can believe what he wrote in that book?”

“I am.”

“He was an historian,” I said firmly, refusing to turn my head and look behind me. “He wouldn't—he
couldn't
—falsify anything, any more than Roger could change what's in the Bible. Or you tell me a deliberate lie.”

“And you of all people ken what history is,” he said bluntly, and stood up, knees cracking. “As for lying…everyone does that, Sassenach, if not often. I've certainly done it.”

“Not to me,” I said. It wasn't a question and he didn't answer it.

“Fetch a bowl, aye?”

He picked up the basin and moved out into the yard, where the wind caught at his shirt and belled the cloth out behind him. The clouds were boiling up behind the mountains, and the smell of rain was sharp on the wind. It wouldn't be long.

I stood, feeling very strange, and turned. The front door was standing open, empty, its canvas covering pushed aside. I felt the wind whoosh past me, moving in my skirts, and heard it go down the hall and into the rooms before me, rattling the small glass jars in my surgery, flapping papers in Jamie's study.

On my way to the kitchen, I glimpsed Frank's book, lying on the table in Jamie's study, and on impulse—glancing involuntarily over my shoulder, though I was quite alone—I stepped in.

The Soul of a Rebel: The Scottish Roots of the American Revolution.
By Franklin W. Randall, PhD.

Jamie had left the book open, facedown. He never treated books like that. He would use anything for a bookmark—leaves, bird's feathers, a hair ribbon…once I had opened a book he was reading to find the small dried body of a skink that someone had stepped on. But he always closed a book, careful of the binding.

Frank stared up at me from the back cover, calm and inscrutable. I touched his face, very gently, through the clear plastic cover, with a feeling of distant grief, regret mingled with—why not be honest now? There was no need to keep secrets from myself—relief. It was finished.

Oddly, the feeling of someone standing behind me had vanished when I came into the house.

I picked the book up to close it, and glanced inside as I did so.
Chapter 16,
said the title at the top of the page.
Partisan Bands.

I fetched the big creamware bowl Jamie had brought me from Salem and took it outside, not glancing at the book—now properly closed on the desk—but well aware of it.

Jamie began the winnowing, taking a handful from the basin, pouring the mix of peanuts and debris from one hand to the next and back again, letting the bits of shell and skin fly away as the heavier peanuts dropped with a small
ting-ting-ting!
into the bowl. The wind was strong enough—it would be too strong in a bit, and start blowing away the nuts as well. I sat down on the ground by the bowl and began to pick out any last fragments of shell that had fallen with the cleaned nuts.

“You've read the book, then?” I asked after a moment, and he nodded, not looking at me. “What do you think of it?”

He made another Scottish noise, shook the last of the peanuts clinking into the bowl, and sat down on the grass beside me.

“I think the bastard wrote it for me, is what I think,” he said bluntly.

I was startled. “For you?”

“Aye. He's talking to me.” He raised one shoulder, self-conscious. “Or at least I think he is. Between the lines. I mean…it might only be as I'm losin' my mind. That's maybe more likely. But…”

“Talking to you…as in, the, um, text seems personally relevant?” I asked carefully. “It couldn't help but be, could it? Given where and when we are just now, I mean.”

He sighed and twitched his shoulders, as though his shirt was too tight—which it wasn't; it was billowing over his shoulders like a sail in the wind. I hadn't seen him do
that
in a long time, and a crawling anxiety tightened my chest.

“He's—it's—” He shook his head, looking for words. “He's talking to me,” he repeated doggedly. “He kens who I am—who I
am,
” he said with emphasis and looked at me, his eyes dark blue. “He kens it's the Scotsman that took his wife from him and he's talkin' directly to me. I can feel him, as if he stood behind me, whispering in my ear.” I flinched, violently, and he blinked, startled.

“That sounds…unpleasant,” I said. The tiny hairs prickled along my jaw.

The corner of his mouth turned up. He stopped what he was doing and took my hand, and I felt better.

“Well, it's a mite unsettling, Sassenach. I dinna
mind
it, exactly—I mean, surely to God he has the right to say things to me if he likes. It's only…why?”

“Well…” I said slowly. “Maybe…perhaps…for us?” I nodded toward the distant creek, where Jem and Germain and Mandy and Fanny were evidently catching leeches, with a good deal of shrieking. My lips felt dry, and I licked them briefly.

“I mean—we think, don't we, that he found out? About you not dying, I mean. And maybe that he knew or guessed that Bree would come back looking for you. Maybe he…found me, too. In history, I mean.” Speaking the words made me feel quite hollow. The thought of Frank discovering something—God knew what—about me in the maelstrom of scattered documents. And making up his mind—while I was still
right there
with him, dammit!—not to tell me—and to find out more.

“He hasn't—mentioned me, has he? In the book?” I forced the words out, just above the sound of the wind. A cold drop struck my cheek, and four large dark spots appeared instantly on my apron.

“No,” Jamie said, and rose to his feet, reaching down a hand to me. “Come inside,
a nighean,
it's starting to rain.”

We barely made it into the house with the basin, the bowl, and our peanut crop—followed in short order by Germain, Jemmy, Fanny, Mandy, Aidan McCallum, and Aodh MacLennan, splattered with rain and with arms full of wet vegetables from the garden.

What with one thing and another—grinding the peanuts, putting the risen bread to bake, washing dirt from the young turnips, saving the greens in a bowl of cold water to keep them from wilting, handing fresh small knobby carrots out to the children, who ate them like candy, then slicing the fresh bread and assembling sandwiches, while roasting sweet potatoes in the ashes and making a warm bacon dressing for the cooked greens—there was no further conversation between me and Jamie about Frank's book. And if anyone stood behind me, he was considerate enough to give me elbow room.

IT WENT ON
raining through supper, and after ascertaining that the McCallums and the MacLennans wouldn't be worrying where their boys were, Jamie brought down the mattresses and all of the children bedded down together in a damp, warm heap before the hearth.

Jamie had made a fire in our bedroom, and the scent of dried fir kindling and hickory wood overlaid the lingering turpentine scent of the fresh timbers. He was lying on the bed, clad in his nightshirt and smelling pleasantly of warm animals, cold hay, and peanut butter, and thumbing idly through my
Merck Manual,
which I'd left on the bedside table.

“Trying the
Sortes Virgilianae,
are you?” I asked, sitting down beside him and shaking my hair loose from its knot. “Most people use the Bible for that, but I suppose Merck might do just as well.”

“Hadna thought of that,” he said, smiling, and closing the book, handed it to me. “Why not? You choose, then.”

“All right.” I weighed the book in my hands for a moment, enjoying the tidy heft of it and the feel of the pebbled cover under my fingertips. I closed my eyes, opened the book at random, and ran my finger down the page. “What have we got?”

Jamie took his spectacles off and leaned over my arm, peering at the spot I'd marked.

“The symptomology of this condition is both varied and obscure, requiring extensive observation and repeated testing before a diagnosis can be made,”
he read. He glanced up at me. “Aye, well, that's about the size of it, no?”

“Yes,” I said, and closed the book, feeling obscurely comforted. Jamie gave a mild snort, but took the book from me and put it back on the table.

“Ye can take the extensive observations as given,” he said dryly. “Repeated testing, though…” His expression changed, turning inward. “Aye, maybe. Just maybe. I'll need to think on that.”

“Do,” I said, made slightly nervous by his look of interested contemplation. I had no idea how one might go about testing a hypothesis like his—or perhaps I did. I swallowed.

“Do you…want me to read it?” I asked. “Frank's book?” The notion of reading
The Soul of a Rebel
—Frank's final book—gave me a feeling that I would have formally diagnosed with no tests whatsoever as the heebie-jeebies. And that, without considering Jamie's notion that Frank had somehow intended the book as a personal message to
him.

He looked at me, startled.

“You? No.”

An outburst of giggling and minor shrieking rose suddenly from below. Jamie made a Scottish noise, got up, and pulled his boots on. Raising an eyebrow at me, he stepped out into the hall and walked slowly toward the head of the stairs, clumping loudly. As he reached the fourth stair, the noise below ceased abruptly. I heard a faint snort of amusement, and he went down quickly. I could hear his voice in the kitchen, and a meek chorus of assent from the children, but made out only the odd word here and there. Another minute, and he came briskly up the stairs again.

“Is the MacLennans' little boy actually named ‘Oogh'?” I asked curiously, as he sat down to take off his boots.

“Aodh, aye,” he said, pronouncing it with a slightly more guttural sound at the end, but still identifiably “Oogh.” “Were we speakin' English, I expect his name would be Hugh. Here, Sassenach.” He handed me a linen towel from the kitchen, wrapped around what proved to be a delectably fragrant peanut butter sandwich on fresh-baked bread with blackberry jelly.

“Ye didna get your fair share at supper,” he said, smiling at me. “Ye were too busy filling all the wee mouths. So I put one aside for ye, on top of your herb cabinet. Recalled it just now.”

“Oh…” I closed my eyes and inhaled beatifically. “Oh, Jamie. This is wonderful!”

He made a pleased sound in his throat, poured me a cup of water, and sat back, hands clasped about his knees, watching me eat. I reveled in every sweet bite, chunky bits of peanut, blackberry seeds, and chewy, grainy bread included, and swallowed the last of it with a sigh of satisfaction and regret.

“Did I ever tell you that I brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with me, when I came back through the stones?”

“No, ye didn't. Why that?”

Why, indeed?

“Well…I think it was because it reminded me of Brianna. I made her peanut butter sandwiches so often, for her school lunches. She had a Zorro lunch box, with a little thermos in it.”

Jamie's eyebrows went up. “Zorro? A Spanish fox?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “I'll tell you about him later. You would have liked him. I didn't take a lunch box, though; I just wrapped my sandwich in a sheet of—of plastic.”

Jamie's brows were still raised. “Like the stuff Mr. Randall's spectacles were made of?”

“No, no.” I flapped my hand, trying to think how to describe Saran Wrap. “More like…like the transparent cover on his book—that's plastic, too—but lighter. Sort of like a very light, transparent handkerchief.” I felt a pang of nostalgia, remembering that day.

“It was when I came to Edinburgh, looking for A. Malcolm, Printer. I was feeling light-headed—with fright, mostly—so I sat down, unwrapped my sandwich, and ate it. I thought then that it was the last peanut butter sandwich I'd ever eat. It was the best thing I ever ate. And when I finished it, I let the bit of plastic go; there was no point in keeping it.” In my mind's eye, I could see it now, the fragile clear plastic crumpling, unfolding, rising, and scudding along the cobblestones, lost out of time.

“I rather felt the same way,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Lost, I mean. I wondered, then, whether someone might find it, and what they might think of it. Probably nothing beyond a moment's curiosity.”

“I daresay,” he murmured, reaching with a corner of the towel to wipe a smear of jelly off my mouth, then kissing me. “But then ye found me, and ye weren't lost anymore, I hope?”