PART THREE
When I Am Thy Captive
7
A FAITH IN DOCUMENTS
Inverness
May 25, 1968
The envelope from Linklater arrived in the morning post.
“Look how fat it is!” Brianna exclaimed. “He’s sent something!” The tip of her nose was pink with excitement.
“Looks like it,” said Roger. He was outwardly calm, but I could see the pulse beating in the hollow of his throat. He picked up the thick manila envelope and held it for a moment, weighing it. Then he ripped the flap recklessly with his thumb, and yanked out a sheaf of photocopied pages.
The cover letter, on heavy university stationery, fluttered out. I snatched it from the floor and read it aloud, my voice shaking a little.
“‘Dear Dr. Wakefield,’” I read. “‘This is in reply to your inquiry regarding the execution of Jacobite officers by the Duke of Cumberland’s troops following the Battle of Culloden. The main source of the quote in my book to which you refer, was the private journal of one Lord Melton, in command of an infantry regiment under Cumberland at the time of Culloden. I have enclosed photocopies of the relevant pages of the journal; as you will see, the story of the survivor, one James Fraser, is an odd and touching one. Fraser is not an important historical character, and not in line with the thrust of my own work, but I have often thought of investigating further, in hopes of determining his eventual fate. Should you find that he did survive the journey to his own estate, I should be happy if you would inform me. I have always rather hoped that he did, though his situation as described by Melton makes the possibility seem unlikely. Sincerely yours, Eric Linklater.’”
The paper rattled in my hand, and I set it down, very carefully, on the desk.
“Unlikely, huh?” Brianna said, standing on tiptoe to see over Roger’s shoulder. “Ha! He did make it back, we know he did!”
“We think he did,” Roger corrected, but it was only scholarly caution; his grin was as broad as Brianna’s.
“Will ye be havin’ tea or cocoa to your elevenses?” Fiona’s curly dark head poked through the study doorway, interrupting the excitement. “There’s fresh ginger-nut biscuits, just baked.” The scent of warm ginger came into the study with her, wafting enticingly from her apron.
“Tea, please,” said Roger, just as Brianna said, “Oh, cocoa sounds great!” Fiona, wearing a smug expression, pushed in the tea cart, sporting both tea cozy and pot of cocoa, as well as a plate of fresh ginger-nut biscuits.
I accepted a cup of tea myself, and sat down in the wing chair with the pages of Melton’s journal. The flowing eighteenth-century handwriting was surprisingly clear, in spite of the archaic spelling, and within minutes, I was in the confines of Leanach farmhouse, imagining the sound of buzzing flies, the stir of close-packed bodies, and the harsh smell of blood soaking into the packed-dirt floor.
“…in satisfaction of my brother’s debt of honor, I could not do otherwise than to spare Fraser’s life. I therefore omitted his name from the list of traitors executed at the farmhouse, and have made arrangement for his transport to his own estate. I cannot feel myself either altogether merciful toward Fraser in the taking of this action, nor yet altogether culpable with respect to my service toward the Duke, as Fraser’s situation, with a great wound in his leg festering and pustulent, makes it unlikely that he will survive the journey to his home. Still, honor prevents my acting otherwise, and I will confess that my spirit was lightened to see the man removed, still living, from the field, as I turned my own attentions to the melancholy task of disposing of the bodies of his comrades. So much killing as I have seen these last two days oppresses me,” the entry ended simply.
I laid the pages down on my knee, swallowing heavily. “A great wound…festering and pustulent…” I knew, as Roger and Brianna could not, just how serious such a wound would have been, with no antibiotics, nothing in the way of proper medical treatment; not even the crude herbal poultices available to a Highland charmer at the time. How long would it have taken, jolting from Culloden to Broch Tuarach in a wagon? Two days? Three? How could he have lived, in such a state, and neglected for so long?
“He did, though.” Brianna’s voice broke in upon my thoughts, answering what seemed to be a similar thought expressed by Roger. She spoke with simple assurance, as though she had seen all the events described in Melton’s journal, and were sure of their outcome. “He did get back. He was the Dunbonnet, I know it.”
“The Dunbonnet?” Fiona, tut-tutting over my cold cup of undrunk tea, looked over her shoulder in surprise. “Heard of the Dunbonnet, have ye?”
“Have you?” Roger looked at the young housekeeper in astonishment.
She nodded, casually dumping my tea into the aspidistra that stood by the hearth and refilling my cup with fresh steaming brew.
“Oh, aye. My grannie tellt me that tale, often and often.”
“Tell us!” Brianna leaned forward, intent, her cocoa cupped between her palms. “Please, Fiona! What’s the story?”
Fiona seemed mildly surprised to find herself suddenly the center of so much attention, but shrugged good-naturedly.
“Och, it’s just the story of one o’ the followers o’ the Bonnie Prince. When there was the great defeat at Culloden, and sae many were killed, a few escaped. Why, one man fled the field and swam the river to get away, but the Redcoats were after him, nonetheless. He came to a kirk along his way, and a service going on inside, and he dashing in, prayed mercy from the minister. The minister and the people took pity on him, and he put on the minister’s robe, so when the Redcoats burst in moments later, there he was, standing at the pulpit, preachin’ the sermon, and the water from his beard and clothes puddled up about his feet. The Redcoats thought they were mistaken, and went on down the road, and so he escaped—and everyone in the kirk said ’twas the best sermon they ever heard!” Fiona laughed heartily, while Brianna frowned, and Roger looked puzzled.
“That was the Dunbonnet?” he said. “But I thought—”
“Och, no!” she assured him. “That was no the Dunbonnet—only the Dunbonnet was another o’ the men who got away from Culloden. He came back to his own estate, but because the Sassenachs were hunting men all across the Highlands, he lay hidden there in a cave for seven years.”
Hearing this, Brianna slumped back in her chair with a sigh of relief. “And his tenants called him the Dunbonnet so as not to speak his name and betray him,” she murmured.
“Ye ken the story?” Fiona asked, astonished. “Aye, that’s right.”
“And did your grannie say what happened to him after that?” Roger prompted.
“Oh, aye!” Fiona’s eyes were round as butterscotch drops. “That’s the best part o’ the story. See, there was a great famine after Culloden; folk were starvin’ in the glens, turned out of their houses in winter, the men shot and the cots set afire. The Dunbonnet’s tenants managed better than most, but even so, there came a day when the food ran out, and their bellies garbeled from dawn ’til dark—no game in the forest, nay grain in the field, and the weans dyin’ in their mothers’ arms for lack o’ milk to feed them.”
A cold chill swept over me at her words. I saw the faces of the Lallybroch inhabitants—the people I had known and loved—pinched with cold and starvation. Not only horror filled me; there was guilt, too. I had been safe, warm, and well-fed, instead of sharing their fate—because I had done as Jamie wanted, and left them. I looked at Brianna, smooth red head bent in absorption, and the tight feeling in my chest eased a bit. She too had been safe for these past years, warm, well-fed, and loved—because I had done as Jamie wanted.
“So he made a bold plan, the Dunbonnet did,” Fiona was continuing. Her round face was alight with the drama of her tale. “He arranged that one of his tenants should go to the English, and offer to betray him. There was a good price on his head, for he’d been a great warrior for the Prince. The tenant would take the gold o’ the reward—to use for the folk on the estate, o’ course—and tell the English where the Dunbonnet might be taken.”
My hand clenched so convulsively at this that the delicate handle of my teacup snapped clean off.
“Taken?” I croaked, my voice hoarse with shock. “Did they hang him?”
Fiona blinked at me in surprise. “Why, no,” she said. “They wanted to, my grannie said, and took him to trial for treason, but in the end, they shut him up in a prison instead—but the gold went to his tenants, and so they lived through the famine,” she ended cheerfully, obviously regarding this as the happy ending.
“Jesus Christ,” Roger breathed. He set his cup down carefully, and sat staring into space, transfixed. “Prison.”
“You sound like that’s good,” Brianna protested. The corners of her mouth were tight with distress, and her eyes slightly shiny.
“It is,” Roger said, not noticing her distress. “There weren’t that many prisons where the English imprisoned Jacobite traitors, and they all kept official records. Don’t you see?” he demanded, looking from Fiona’s bewilderment to Brianna’s scowl, then settling on me in hope of finding understanding. “If he went to prison, I can find him.” He turned then, to look up at the towering shelves of books that lined three walls of the study, holding the late Reverend Wakefield’s collection of Jacobite arcana.
“He’s in there,” Roger said softly. “On a prison roll. In a document—real evidence! Don’t you see?” he demanded again, turning back to me. “Going to prison made him a part of written history again! And somewhere in there, we’ll find him!”
“And what happened to him then,” Brianna breathed. “When he was released.”
Roger’s lips pressed tight together, to cut off the alternative that sprang to his mind, as it had to mine—“or died.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, taking Brianna’s hand. His eyes met mine, deep green and unfathomable. “When he was released.”
* * *
A week later, Roger’s faith in documents remained unshaken. The same could not be said for the eighteenth-century table in the late Reverend Wakefield’s study, whose spindly legs wobbled and creaked alarmingly beneath their unaccustomed burden.
This table normally was asked to accommodate no more than a small lamp, and a collection of the Reverend’s smaller artifacts; it was pressed into service now only because every other horizontal surface in the study already overflowed with papers, journals, books, and bulging manila envelopes from antiquarian societies, universities, and research libraries across England, Scotland, and Ireland.
“If you set one more page on that thing, it’s going to collapse,” Claire observed, as Roger carelessly reached out, meaning to drop the folder he was carrying on the little inlaid table.
“Ah? Oh, right.” He switched direction in midair, looked vainly for another place to put the folder, and finally settled for placing it on the floor at his feet.
“I’ve just about finished with Wentworth,” Claire said. She indicated a precarious stack on the floor with her toe. “Have we got in the records for Berwick yet?”
“Yes, just this morning. Where did I put them, though?” Roger stared vaguely about the room, which strongly resembled the sacking of the library at Alexandria, just before the first torch was lit. He rubbed his forehead, trying to concentrate. After a week of spending ten-hour days thumbing the handwritten registers of British prisons, and the letters, journals, and diaries of their governors, searching for any official trace of Jamie Fraser, Roger was beginning to feel as though his eyes had been sandpapered.
“It was blue,” he said at last. “I distinctly remember it was blue. I got those from McAllister, the History Lecturer at Trinity at Cambridge, and Trinity College uses those big envelopes in pale blue, with the college’s coat of arms on the front. Maybe Fiona’s seen it. Fiona!”
He stepped to the study door and called down the hall toward the kitchen. Despite the lateness of the hour, the light was still on, and the heartening scent of cocoa and freshly baked almond cake lingered in the air. Fiona would never abandon her post while there was the faintest possibility that someone in her vicinity might require nourishment.
“Och, aye?” Fiona’s curly brown head poked out of the kitchen. “There’ll be cocoa ready directly,” she assured him. “I’m only waiting for the cake to be out of the oven.”
Roger smiled at her with deep affection. Fiona had not the slightest use herself for history—never read anything beyond My Weekly magazine—but she never questioned his activities, tranquilly dusting the heaps of books and papers daily, without bothering about their contents.
“Thanks, Fiona,” he said. “I was only wondering, though; have you seen a big blue envelope—a fat one, about so?” He measured with his hands. “It came in the morning post, but I’ve misplaced it.”
“Ye left it in the upstairs bath,” she said promptly. “There’s that great thick book wi’ the gold writing and the picture of the Bonnie Prince on the front up there, and three letters ye’d just opened, and there’s the gas bill, too, which ye dinna want to be forgetting, it’s due on the fourteenth o’ the month. I’ve put it all on the top of the geyser, so as to be out of the way.” A tiny, sharp ding from the oven timer made her withdraw her head abruptly with a smothered exclamation.
Roger turned and went up the stairs two at a time, smiling. Given other inclinations, Fiona’s memory might have made her a scholar. As it was, she was no mean research assistant. So long as a particular document or book could be described on the basis of its appearance, rather than its title or contents, Fiona was bound to know exactly where it was.
“Och, it’s nothing,” she had assured Roger airily, when he had tried to apologize earlier for the mess he was making of the house. “Ye’d think the Reverend was still alive, wi’ such a moil of papers strewn everywhere. It’s just like old times, no?”
Coming down more slowly, with the blue envelope in his hands, he wondered what his late adoptive father might have thought of this present quest.
“In it up to the eyebrows, I shouldn’t wonder,” he murmured to himself. He had a vivid memory of the Reverend, bald head gleaming under the old-fashioned bowl lamps that hung from the hall ceiling, as he pottered from his study to the kitchen, where old Mrs. Graham, Fiona’s grandmother, would have been manning the stove, supplying the old man’s bodily needs during bouts of late-night scholarship, just as Fiona was now doing for him.
It made one wonder, he thought, as he went into the study. In the old days, when a man’s son usually followed his father’s profession, was that only a matter of convenience—wanting to keep the business in the family—or was there some sort of family predisposition for some kinds of work? Were some people actually born to be smiths, or merchants, or cooks—born to an inclination and an aptitude, as well as to the opportunity?
Clearly it didn’t apply to everyone; there were always the people who left their homes, went a-wandering, tried things hitherto unknown in their family circles. If that weren’t so, probably there would be no inventors, no explorers; still, there seemed to be a certain affinity for some careers in some families, even in these restless modern times of widespread education and easy travel.
What he was really wondering about, he thought to himself, was Brianna. He watched Claire, her curly gold-shot head bent over the desk, and found himself wondering how much Brianna would be like her, and how much like the shadowy Scot—warrior, farmer, courtier, laird—who had been her father?
His thoughts were still running on such lines a quarter-hour later, when Claire closed the last folder on her stack and sat back, sighing.
“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, reaching for her drink.
“Not worth that much,” Roger replied with a smile, coming out of his reverie. “I was only wondering how people come to be what they are. How did you come to be a doctor, for instance?”
“How did I come to be a doctor?” Claire inhaled the steam from her cup of cocoa, decided it was too hot to drink, and set it back on the desk, among the litter of books and journals and pencil-scribbled sheets of paper. She gave Roger a half-smile and rubbed her hands together, dispersing the warmth of the cup.
“How did you come to be a historian?”
“More or less honestly,” he answered, leaning back in the Reverend’s chair and waving at the accumulation of papers and trivia all around them. He patted a small gilt traveling clock that sat on the desk, an elegant bit of eighteenth-century workmanship, with miniature chimes that struck the hour, the quarter, and the half.
“I grew up in the midst of it all; I was ferreting round the Highlands in search of artifacts with my father from the time I could read. I suppose it just seemed natural to keep doing it. But you?”
She nodded and stretched, easing her shoulders from the long hours of stooping over the desk. Brianna, unable to stay awake, had given up and gone to bed an hour before, but Claire and Roger had gone on with their search through the administrative records of British prisons.
“Well, it was something like that for me,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that I suddenly decided I must become a doctor—it was just that I suddenly realized one day that I’d been one for a long time—and then I wasn’t, and I missed it.”
She spread her hands out on the desk and flexed her fingers, long and supple, the nails buffed into neat, shiny ovals.
“There used to be an old song from the First World War,” she said reflectively. “I used to hear it sometimes when some of Uncle Lamb’s old army friends would come round and stay up late and get drunk. It went, ‘How You Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?’” She sang the first line, then broke off with a wry smile.
“I’d seen Paree,” she said softly. She looked up from her hands, alert and present, but with the traces of memory in her eyes, fixed on Roger with the clarity of a second sight. “And a lot of other things besides. Caen and Amiens, Preston, and Falkirk, the H?pital des Anges and the so-called surgery at Leoch. I’d been a doctor, in every way there is—I’d delivered babies, set bones, stitched wounds, treated fevers…” She trailed off, and shrugged. “There was a terrible lot I didn’t know, of course. I knew how much I could learn—and that’s why I went to medical school. But it didn’t really make a difference, you know.” She dipped a finger into the whipped cream floating on her cocoa, and licked it off. “I have a diploma with an M.D. on it—but I was a doctor long before I set foot in medical school.”
“It can’t possibly have been as easy as you make it sound.” Roger blew on his own cocoa, studying Claire with open interest. “There weren’t many women in medicine then—there aren’t that many women doctors now, come to that—and you had a family, besides.”
“No, I can’t say it was easy at all.” Claire looked at him quizzically. “I waited until Brianna was in school, of course, and we had enough money to afford someone to come in to cook and clean—but…” She shrugged and smiled ironically. “I stopped sleeping for several years, there. That helped a bit. And oddly enough, Frank helped, too.”
Roger tested his own cup and found it almost cool enough to drink. He held it between his hands, enjoying the heat of the thick white porcelain seeping into his palms. Early June it might be, but the nights were cool enough to make the electric fire still a necessity.
“Really?” he said curiously. “Only from the things you’ve said about him, I shouldn’t have thought he’d have liked your wanting to go to medical school or be a doctor.”
“He didn’t.” Her lips pressed tight together; the motion told Roger more than words might, recalling arguments, conversations half-finished and abandoned, an opposition of stubbornness and devious obstruction rather than of open disapproval.
What a remarkably expressive face she had, he thought, watching her. He wondered quite suddenly whether his own were as easily readable. The thought was so unsettling that he dipped his face into his mug, gulping the cocoa, although it was still a bit too hot.
He emerged from the cup to find Claire watching him, slightly sardonic.
“Why?” he asked quickly, to distract her. “What made him change his mind?”
“Bree,” she said, and her face softened as it always did at the mention of her daughter. “Bree was the only thing really important to Frank.”
I had, as I’d said, waited until Brianna began school before beginning medical school myself. But even so, there was a large gap between her hours and my own, which we filled haphazardly with a series of more or less competent housekeepers and baby-sitters; some more, most of them less.
My mind went back to the frightful day when I had gotten a call at the hospital, telling me that Brianna was hurt. I had dashed out of the place, not pausing to change out of the green linen scrub-suit I was wearing, and raced for home, ignoring all speed limits, to find a police car and an ambulance lighting the night with blood-red pulses, and a knot of interested neighbors clustered on the street outside.
As we pieced the story together later, what had happened was that the latest temporary sitter, annoyed at my being late yet again, had simply put on her coat at quitting time and left, abandoning seven-year-old Brianna with instructions to “wait for Mommy.” This she had obediently done, for an hour or so. But as it began to get dark, she had become frightened in the house alone, and determined to go out and find me. Making her way across one of the busy streets near our house, she had been struck by a car turning into the street.
She wasn’t—thank God!—hurt badly; the car had been moving slowly, and she had only been shaken and bruised by the experience. Not nearly as shaken as I was, for that matter. Nor as bruised, when I came into the living room to find her lying on the sofa, and she looked at me, tears welling afresh on her stained cheeks and said, “Mommy! Where were you? I couldn’t find you!”
It had taken just about all my reserves of professional composure to comfort her, to check her over, re-tend her cuts and scrapes, thank her rescuers—who, to my fevered mind, all glared accusingly at me—and put her to bed with her teddy bear clutched securely in her arms. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and cried myself.
Frank patted me awkwardly, murmuring, but then gave it up, and with more practicality, went to make tea.
“I’ve decided,” I said, when he set the steaming cup in front of me. I spoke dully, my head feeling thick and clogged. “I’ll resign. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Resign?” Frank’s voice was sharp with astonishment. “From the school? What for?”
“I can’t stand it anymore.” I never took cream or sugar in my tea. Now I added both, stirring and watching the milky tendrils swirl through the cup. “I can’t stand leaving Bree, and not knowing if she’s well cared for—and knowing she isn’t happy. You know she doesn’t really like any of the sitters we’ve tried.”
“I know that, yes.” He sat opposite me, stirring his own tea. After a long moment, he said, “But I don’t think you should resign.”
It was the last thing I had expected; I had thought he would greet my decision with relieved applause. I stared at him in astonishment, then blew my nose yet again on the wadded tissue from my pocket.
“You don’t?”
“Ah, Claire.” He spoke impatiently, but with a tinge of affection nonetheless. “You’ve known forever who you are. Do you realize at all how unusual it is to know that?”
“No.” I wiped my nose with the shredding tissue, dabbing carefully to keep it in one piece.
Frank leaned back in his chair, shaking his head as he looked at me.
“No, I suppose not,” he said. He was quiet for a minute, looking down at his folded hands. They were long-fingered, narrow; smooth and hairless as a girl’s. Elegant hands, made for casual gestures and the emphasis of speech.
He stretched them out on the table and looked at them as though he’d never seen them before.
“I haven’t got that,” he said quietly at last. “I’m good, all right. At what I do—the teaching, the writing. Bloody splendid sometimes, in fact. And I like it a good bit, enjoy what I do. But the thing is—” He hesitated, then looked at me straight on, hazel-eyed and earnest. “I could do something else, and be as good. Care as much, or as little. I haven’t got that absolute conviction that there’s something in life I’m meant to do—and you have.”
“Is that good?” The edges of my nostrils were sore, and my eyes puffed from crying.
He laughed shortly. “It’s damned inconvenient, Claire. To you and me and Bree, all three. But my God, I do envy you sometimes.”
He reached out for my hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I let him have it.
“To have that passion for anything”—a small twitch tugged the corner of his mouth—“or anyone. That’s quite splendid, Claire, and quite terribly rare.” He squeezed my hand gently and let it go, turning to reach behind him for one of the books on the shelf beside the table.
It was one of his references, Woodhill’s Patriots, a series of profiles of the American Founding Fathers.
He laid his hand on the cover of the book, gently, as though reluctant to disturb the rest of the sleeping lives interred there.
“These were people like that. The ones who cared so terribly much—enough to risk everything, enough to change and do things. Most people aren’t like that, you know. It isn’t that they don’t care, but that they don’t care so greatly.” He took my hand again, this time turning it over. One finger traced the lines that webbed my palm, tickling as it went.
“Is it there, I wonder?” he said, smiling a little. “Are some people destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they’re born somehow with that great passion—and if they find themselves in the right circumstances, then things happen? It’s the sort of thing you wonder, studying history…but there’s no way of telling, really. All we know is what they accomplished.
“But Claire—” His eyes held a definite note of warning, as he tapped the cover of his book. “They paid for it,” he said.
“I know.” I felt very remote now, as though I were watching us from a distance; I could see it quite clearly in my mind’s eye; Frank, handsome, lean, and a little tired, going beautifully gray at the temples. Me, grubby in my surgical scrubs, my hair coming down, the front of my shirt crumpled and stained with Brianna’s tears.
We sat in silence for some time, my hand still resting in Frank’s. I could see the mysterious lines and valleys, clear as a road map—but a road to what unknown destination?
I had had my palm read once years before, by an old Scottish lady named Graham—Fiona’s grandmother, in fact. “The lines in your hand change as you change,” she had said. “It’s no so much what you’re born with, as what ye make of yourself.”
And what had I made of myself, what was I making? A mess, that was what. Neither a good mother, nor a good wife, nor a good doctor. A mess. Once I had thought I was whole—had seemed to be able to love a man, to bear a child, to heal the sick—and know that all these things were natural parts of me, not the difficult, troubled fragments into which my life had now disintegrated. But that had been in the past, the man I had loved was Jamie, and for a time, I had been part of something greater than myself.
“I’ll take Bree.”
I was so deep in miserable thought that for a moment, Frank’s words didn’t register, and I stared at him stupidly.
“What did you say?”
“I said,” he repeated patiently, “that I’ll take Bree. She can come from her school to the university, and play at my office until I’m ready to come home.”
I rubbed my nose. “I thought you didn’t think it appropriate for staff to bring their children to work.” He had been quite critical of Mrs. Clancy, one of the secretaries, who had brought her grandson to work for a month when his mother was sick.
He shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
“Well, circumstances alter cases. And Brianna’s not likely to be running up and down the halls shrieking and spilling ink like Bart Clancy.”
“I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” I said wryly. “But you’d do that?” A small feeling was growing in the pit of my clenched stomach; a cautious, unbelieving feeling of relief. I might not trust Frank to be faithful to me—I knew quite well he wasn’t—but I did trust him unequivocally to care for Bree.
Suddenly the worry was removed. I needn’t hurry home from the hospital, filled with dread because I was late, hating the thought of finding Brianna crouched in her room sulking because she didn’t like the current sitter. She loved Frank; I knew she would be ecstatic at the thought of going to his office every day.
“Why?” I asked bluntly. “It isn’t that you’re dead keen on my being a doctor; I know that.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “It isn’t that. But I do think there isn’t any way to stop you—perhaps the best I can do is to help, so that there will be less damage to Brianna.” His features hardened slightly then, and he turned away.
“So far as he ever felt he had a destiny—something he was really meant to do—he felt that Brianna was it,” Claire said. She stirred her cocoa meditatively.
“Why do you care, Roger?” she asked him suddenly. “Why are you asking me?”
He took a moment to answer, slowly sipping his cocoa. It was rich and dark, made with new cream and a sprinkle of brown sugar. Fiona, always a realist, had taken one look at Brianna and given up her attempts to lure Roger into matrimony via his stomach, but Fiona was a cook the same way Claire was a doctor; born to skill, and unable not to use it.
“Because I’m a historian, I suppose,” he answered finally. He watched her over the rim of his cup. “I need to know. What people really did, and why they did it.”
“And you think I can tell you that?” She glanced sharply at him. “Or that I know?”
He nodded, sipping. “You know, better than most people. Most of a historian’s sources haven’t your”—he paused and gave her a grin—“your unique perspective, shall we say?”
There was a sudden lessening of tension. She laughed and picked up her own cup. “We shall say that,” she agreed.
“The other thing,” he went on, watching her closely, “is that you’re honest. I don’t think you could lie, even if you wanted to.”
She glanced at him sharply, and gave a short, dry laugh.
“Everyone can lie, young Roger, given cause enough. Even me. It’s only that it’s harder for those of us who live in glass faces; we have to think up our lies ahead of time.”
She bent her head and shuffled through the papers before her, turning the pages over slowly, one by one. They were lists of names, these sheets, lists of prisoners, copied from the ledger books of British prisons. The task was complicated by the fact that not all prisons had been well-run.
Some governors kept no official lists of their inmates, or listed them haphazardly in their journals, in among the notations of daily expenditure and maintenance, making no great distinction between the death of a prisoner and the slaughter of two bullocks, salted for meat.
Roger thought Claire had abandoned the conversation, but a moment later she looked up again.
“You’re quite right, though,” she said. “I’m honest—from default, more than anything. It isn’t easy for me not to say what I’m thinking. I imagine you see it because you’re the same way.”
“Am I?” Roger felt absurdly pleased, as though someone had given him an unexpected present.
Claire nodded, a small smile on her lips as she watched him.
“Oh, yes. It’s unmistakable, you know. There aren’t many people like that—who will tell you the truth about themselves and anything else right out. I’ve only met three people like that, I think—four now,” she said, her smile widening to warm him.
“There was Jamie, of course.” Her long fingers rested lightly on the stack of papers, almost caressing in their touch. “Master Raymond, the apothecary I knew in Paris. And a friend I met in medical school—Joe Abernathy. Now you. I think.”
She tilted her cup and swallowed the last of the rich brown liquid. She set it down and looked directly at Roger.
“Frank was right, in a way, though. It isn’t necessarily easier if you know what it is you’re meant to do—but at least you don’t waste time in questioning or doubting. If you’re honest—well, that isn’t necessarily easier, either. Though I suppose if you’re honest with yourself and know what you are, at least you’re less likely to feel that you’ve wasted your life, doing the wrong thing.”
She set aside the stack of papers and drew up another—a set of folders with the characteristic logo of the British Museum on the covers.
“Jamie had that,” she said softly, as though to herself. “He wasn’t a man to turn away from anything he thought his job. Dangerous or not. And I think he won’t have felt himself wasted—no matter what happened to him.”
She lapsed into silence, then, absorbed in the spidery tracings of some long-dead writer, looking for the entry that might tell her what Jamie Fraser had done and been, and whether his life had been wasted in a prison cell, or ended in a lonely dungeon.
The clock on the desk struck midnight, its chimes surprisingly deep and melodious for such a small instrument. The quarter-hour struck, and then the half, punctuating the monotonous rustle of pages. Roger put down the sheaf of flimsy papers he had been thumbing through, and yawned deeply, not troubling to cover his mouth.
“I’m so tired I’m seeing double,” he said. “Shall we go on with it in the morning?”
Claire didn’t answer for a moment; she was looking into the glowing bars of the electric fire, a look of unutterable distance on her face. Roger repeated his question, and slowly she came back from wherever she was.
“No,” she said. She reached for another folder, and smiled at Roger, the look of distance lingering in her eyes. “You go on, Roger,” she said. “I’ll—just look a little longer.”
* * *
When I finally found it, I nearly flipped right past it. I had not been reading the names carefully, but only skimming the pages for the letter “J.” “John, Joseph, Jacques, James.” There were James Edward, James Alan, James Walter, ad infinitum. Then it was there, the writing small and precise across the page: “Jms. MacKenzie Fraser, of Brock Turac.”
I put the page down carefully on the table, shut my eyes for a moment to clear them, then looked again. It was still there.
“Jamie,” I said aloud. My heart was beating heavily in my chest. “Jamie,” I said again, more quietly.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Everyone was asleep, but the house, in the manner of old houses, was still awake around me, creaking and sighing, keeping me company. Strangely enough, I had no desire to leap up and wake Brianna or Roger, to tell them the news. I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit, as though I were alone here in the lamp-lit room with Jamie himself.
My finger traced the line of ink. The person who had written that line had seen Jamie—perhaps had written this with Jamie standing in front of him. The date at the top of the page was May 16, 1753. It had been close to this time of year, then. I could imagine how the air had been, chilly and fresh, with the rare spring sun across his shoulders, lighting sparks in his hair.
How had he worn his hair then—short, or long? He had preferred to wear it long, plaited or tailed behind. I remembered the casual gesture with which he would lift the weight of it off his neck to cool himself in the heat of exercise.
He would not have worn his kilt—the wearing of all tartans had been outlawed after Culloden. Breeks, then, likely, and a linen shirt. I had made such sarks for him; I could feel the softness of the fabric in memory, the billowing length of the three full yards it took to make one, the long tails and full sleeves that let the Highland men drop their plaids and sleep or fight with a sark their only garment. I could imagine his shoulders broad beneath the rough-woven cloth, his skin warm through it, hands touched with the chill of the Scottish spring.
He had been imprisoned before. How would he have looked, facing an English prison clerk, knowing all too well what waited for him? Grim as hell, I thought, staring down that long, straight nose with his eyes a cold, dark blue—dark and forbidding as the waters of Loch Ness.
I opened my own eyes, realizing only then that I was sitting on the edge of my chair, the folder of photocopied pages clasped tight to my chest, so caught up in my conjuration that I had not even paid attention to which prison these registers had come from.
There were several large prisons that the English had used regularly in the eighteenth century, and a number of minor ones. I turned the folder over, slowly. Would it be Berwick, near the border? The notorious Tolbooth of Edinburgh? Or one of the southern prisons, Leeds Castle or even the Tower of London?
“Ardsmuir,” said the notecard neatly stapled to the front of the folder.
“Ardsmuir?” I said blankly. “Where the hell is that?”