The Fiery Cross (184 page)

“Do what?” I pulled a clean handkerchief from my bodice and handed it to him.

“Make me feel as though I am eight years old,” he said ruefully. “And an idiot, to boot.”

He wiped his nose, then reached out a hand to touch the flattened roses, gently.

I WAS THRILLED with Jenny’s letter, and knew that Jamie’s heart was substantially lightened by its receipt. At the same time, I remained extremely curious about the incident she had begun to describe—and knew that Jamie was even more interested, though he carefully refrained from saying so.

A letter arrived a week or so later, sent by his brother-in-law Ian, but while this contained the usual news of Lallybroch and Broch Mordha, it made no mention whatever of Jenny’s adventure near Balriggan, nor her subsequent discovery in the grape arbor.

“I don’t suppose you could ask either of them?” I suggested delicately, perched on the fence as I watched him preparing to castrate a litter of piglets. “Ian or Jenny?”

“I could not,” Jamie replied firmly. “And after all, it’s no my business, is it? If yon woman was ever my wife, she surely is not now. If she chooses to take a lover, it’s her own affair. Surely.” He stamped on the foot-bellows, fanning up the small fire in which the cautery iron was heating, and pulled the castrating shears from his belt. “Which end of the business d’ye want, Sassenach?”

It was a choice between the strong possibility of being bitten while clipping the teeth and the certainty of being shitten while assaulting the other end. The unfortunate truth was that Jamie was far stronger than I, and while he could certainly castrate an animal with no difficulty at all, I did have some professional expertise. It was therefore practicality rather than heroism that dictated my choice, and I had prepared for this activity by donning my heavy canvas apron, wooden clogs, and a ragged ex-shirt that had once belonged to Fergus, and was bound from the pigpen straight into the fire.

“You hold; I’ll snip.” I slid off the fence and took the shears.

There ensued a brief but noisy interlude, after which the five piglets were sent off to a consolatory meal of kitchen scraps, their rear aspects heavily daubed with a tar and turpentine mixture to prevent infection.

“What do you think?” I asked, seeing them settle down to their feeding in an apparent state of content. “If you were a pig, I mean. Would you rather root for your food, but keep your balls, or give them up and wallow in luxurious swill?” These would be kept penned, raised carefully on slops for tender meat, while most of the pigs were routinely turned out into the wood to manage for themselves.

Jamie shook his head.

“I suppose they canna miss what they’ve never had,” he said. “And they’ve had food, after all.” He leaned on the fence for a few moments, watching the curly tails begin to wag and twirl with pleasure, the tiny wounds beneath apparently forgotten.

“Besides,” he added cynically, “a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy—though I havena met many who’d wish them gone, for all that.”

“Well, priests might find them a burden, I suppose.” I pulled the stained shirt gingerly away from my body before lifting it over my head. “Phew. Nothing smells worse than pig excrement—nothing.”

“What—not a blackbirder’s hold, or a rotting corpse?” he asked, laughing. “Festering wounds? A billy goat?”

“Pig shit,” I said firmly. “Hands down.”

Jamie took the wadded shirt from me and ripped it into strips, reserving the cleanest ones for jobs like wiping tools and wedging cracks. The rest he consigned to the fire, stepping back as a random breeze blew a plume of reeking smoke in our direction.

“Aye, well, there was Narses. He was a great general, or so they say, in spite of being a eunuch.”

“Perhaps a man’s mind works better without the distraction,” I suggested, laughing.

He gave no more than a brief snort in reply to this, though it was tinged with amusement. He shoveled dirt onto the cinders of the fire, while I retrieved my cautery iron and tar-pot, and we went back to the house, talking of other things.

My mind lingered on that one remark, though—“a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy.” Had he been speaking only generally? I wondered. Or had there been some personal allusion lurking in it?

In everything he had ever said to me regarding his brief marriage to Laoghaire MacKenzie—little as that was, by our common consent—there had been no hint that he had felt physically drawn to her. He had wed her from loneliness and a sense of duty, wanting some small anchor in the emptiness his life had been after his return from England. Or so he had said.

And I believed what he’d said. He was a man of honor and duty, and I knew what his loneliness had been—for I had had my own. On the other hand, I knew his body, nearly as well as my own. If it had a great capacity to endure hardship, it had an equal capacity to experience great joy. Jamie could be ascetic from necessity—never from natural temperament.

Most of the time I succeeded in forgetting that he had shared Laoghaire’s bed, however briefly and—he said—unsatisfactorily. I did not forget that she had been, and was still, quite an attractive woman.

Which left me rather wishing that Jenny Murray had found some other inspiration for the conversion of her feelings toward her brother.

JAMIE WAS QUIET and abstracted through the rest of the day, though he roused himself to be sociable when Fergus and Marsali arrived with their children for a visit after supper. He taught Germain to play draughts, while Fergus recalled for Roger the words of a ballad he had picked up in the alleys of Paris as a juvenile pickpocket. The women retired to the hearth to stitch baby gowns, knit booties, and—in honor of Marsali’s advancing pregnancy and Lizzie’s engagement—entertain each other with hair-raising anecdotes of labor and birth.

“Laid sideways, the babe was, and the size of a six-month shoat . . .”

“Ha, Germain had a head like a cannonball, the midwife said, and he was facing
backward
, the wee rattan—”

“Jemmy had a huge head, but it was his shoulders that were the problem. . . .”

“. . .
le bourse
. . . the lady’s ‘purse,’ of course, is her—”

“Her means of making a living, aye, I see. Then the next bit, where her customer puts his fingers
in
her purse—”

“No, ye dinna get to move yet, it’s still my turn, for I’ve jumped your man
there
, and so I can go
here
—”

“Merde!”

“Germain!” Marsali bellowed. She glared at her offspring, who hunched his shoulders, scowling at the draughtboard, lower lip thrust out.

“Dinna fash yourself, man, for see? Now it’s your turn, ye can go
there
, and
there
, and
there
—”

“. . .
Avez-vous ête a la selle aujourd’hui?
. . . and what he is asking the whore, of course—”

“‘Have you—been in the saddle today?’ Or would it be, ‘Have you had a ride today?’ ”

Fergus laughed, the end of his aristocratic nose pinkening with amusement.

“Well, that is one translation, surely.”

Roger lifted a brow at him, half-smiling.

“Aye?”

“That particular expression is also what a French doctor says,” I put in, seeing his incomprehension. “Colloquially speaking, it means, ‘Have you had a bowel movement today?’ ”

“The lady in question being perhaps
une specialiste
,” Fergus explained cheerfully. “I used to know one who—”

“Fergus!”
Marsali’s whole face was pink, though she seemed more amused than outraged.

“I see,” Roger murmured, eyebrows still raised as he struggled with the nuances of this bit of sophisticated translation. I did wonder how one would set it to music.

“Comment sont vos selles, grandpere?”
Germain inquired chummily, evidently familiar with this line of social inquiry. And how are your stools, grandfather?

“Free and easy,” his grandfather assured him. “Eat up your parritch every morning, and ye’ll never have piles.”

“Da!”

“Well, it’s true,” Jamie protested.

Brianna was bright red, and emitting small fizzing noises. Jemmy stirred in her lap.

“
Le petit rouge
eats parritch,” Germain observed, frowning narrowly at Jemmy, who was nursing contentedly at his mother’s breast, eyes closed. “He shits stones.”

“Germain!”
all the women shouted in unison.

“Well, it’s true,” he said, in perfect imitation of his grandfather. Looking dignified, he turned his back on the women and began building towers with the draughts-men.

“He doesna seem to want to give up the teat,” Marsali observed, nodding at Jemmy. “Neither did Germain, but he’d no choice—nor did poor wee Joanie.” She glanced ruefully down at her stomach, which was barely beginning to swell with Number Three.

I caught the barest flicker of a glance between Roger and Bree, followed by a Mona Lisa smile on Brianna’s face. She settled herself more comfortably, and stroked Jemmy’s head.
Enjoy it while you can, sweetheart,
her actions said, more vividly than words.

I felt my own eyebrows rise, and glanced toward Jamie. He’d seen that little byplay, too, and gave me the male equivalent of Brianna’s smile, before turning back to the draughtsboard.

“I like parritch,” Lizzie put in shyly, in a minor attempt to change the subject. “Specially with honey and milk.”

“Ah,” said Fergus, reminded of his original task. He turned back to Roger, lifting a finger. “Honeypots. The refrain, you see, where
les abeilles
come buzzing—”

“Aye, aye, that’s so,” Mrs. Bug neatly recaptured the conversation, when he paused to draw breath, “parritch wi’ honey is the best thing for the bowels, though sometimes even that fails. Why, I kent a man once, who couldna move his bowels for more than a month!”

“Indeed. Did he try a pellet of wax rolled in goose-grease? Or a tisane of grape leaves?” Fergus was instantly diverted. French to the core, he was a great connoisseur of purges, laxatives, and suppositories.

“Everything,” Mrs. Bug assured him. “Parritch, dried apples, wine mixed wi’ an ox’s gall, water drunk at the dark o’ the moon at midnight . . . nothing at all would shift him. ’Twas the talk of the village, wi’ folk placing wagers, and the poor man gone quite gray in the face. Nervous spasms, it was, and his bowels tied up like garter strings, so that—”

“Did he explode?” Germain asked, interested.

Mrs. Bug shook briefly with laughter.

“No, that he didna, laddie. Though I did hear as how it was a near thing.”

“What was it finally shifted him, then?” Jamie asked.

“She finally said she’d marry me, and not the other fellow.” Mr. Bug, who had been dozing in the corner of the settle through the evening, stood up and stretched himself, then put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, smiling tenderly down at her upturned face. “’Twas a great relief, to be sure.”

IT WAS LATE when we went to bed, after a convivial evening that ended with Fergus singing the prostitute’s ballad in its lengthy entirety to general applause, Jamie and German beating time on the table with their hands.

Jamie lay back against the pillow, hands crossed behind his head, chuckling to himself now and then as bits of the song came back to him. It was cold enough that the windowpanes were misted with our breath, but he wore no nightshirt, and I admired the sight of him as I sat brushing my hair.

He had recovered well from the snakebite, but was still thinner than usual, so that the graceful arch of his collarbone was visible, and the long muscles of his arms roped from bone to bone, distinct beneath his skin. The skin of his chest was bronze where his shirt usually lay open, but the tender skin on the underside of his arms was white as milk, a tracery of blue veins showing. The light shadowed the prominent bones of his face and glimmered from his hair, cinnamon and amber where it lay across his shoulders, dark auburn and red-gold where it dusted his bared body.

“The candlelight becomes ye, Sassenach,” he said, smiling, and I saw that he was watching me, blue eyes the color of bottomless ocean.

“I was just thinking the same of you,” I said, standing up and putting aside my brush. My hair floated in a cloud round my shoulders, clean, soft, and shining. It smelled of marigolds and sunflowers and so did my skin. Bathing and shampooing in winter was a major undertaking, but I had been determined not to go to bed smelling of pig shit.

“Let it burn, then,” he said, reaching out to stop me as I bent to blow the candle out. His hand curled round my wrist, urging me toward him.

“Come to bed, and let me watch ye. I like the way the light moves in your eyes; like whisky, when ye pour it on a haggis, and then set it on fire.”

“How poetic,” I murmured, but made no demur as he made room for me, pulled loose the drawstring of my shift, and slipped it off me. The air of the room was cold enough to make my nipples draw up tight, but the skin of his chest was delightfully warm on my breasts as he gathered me into him, sighing with pleasure.

“It’s Fergus’s song inspiring me, I expect,” he said, cupping one of my breasts in his hand and weighing it with a nice balance between admiration and appraisal. “God, ye’ve the loveliest breasts. Ye recall that one verse, where he says the lady’s tits were so enormous, she could wrap them round his ears? Yours aren’t so big as that, of course, but d’ye think ye maybe could wrap them round—”

“I don’t think they need to be enormous to do
that
,” I assured him. “Move up. Besides, I don’t believe it’s actually wrapping round, so much as it is squashing together, and they’re certainly large enough for . . . see?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding deeply gratified and a little breathless. “Aye, ye’re right. That’s . . . oh, that looks verra beautiful, Sassenach—at least from here.”

“It looks very interesting from here, too,” I assured him, trying neither to laugh nor go cross-eyed. “Which one of us moves, do you think?”

“Me, for now. I’m no chafing ye, Sassenach?” he inquired.

“Well, just a bit. Wait, though—” I reached out a hand, feeling blindly over the table by the bed. I got hold of the little pot of creamy almond ointment I used for hand lotion, flicked the lid off, and dug a finger into it.