Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

“Persons who have truly interesting lives never write about them, John—or not with an eye to publication, at least. The ability to keep their own counsel is one of the things that makes them interesting and is also what causes other truly interesting people to confide in them.”


“I assure you, Mother,” he said dryly, “you are undoubtedly the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”

She snorted briefly and gave him a direct look.

“I suppose that’s why you haven’t yet married, is it?”

“I didn’t think a wife needed to be interesting,” he replied, with some honesty. “Most of the ones I know certainly aren’t.”

“How true,” she said briefly. “Is there any wine in the house, John? I’ve got rather fond of Spanish wine since I’ve been here.”

“Sangria do you? One of the maids brought me a pitcher of it, but I hadn’t drunk any yet.” He got up and fetched the pitcher—a beautiful smooth stoneware thing the color of mulberries—and brought it with a pair of glasses to the table between their chairs.

“That will be perfect,” she said, and leaned forward with a sigh, massaging her temples. “Oh, God. I go about all day, feeling that none of it is real, that everything is just as I left it, and then suddenly—” She broke off and dropped her hands, her features drawn with pain and tiredness. “Suddenly it’s real again.”

She glanced at the secretaire as she said this, and John caught a hint of something in her voice. He poured the wine carefully, not to let the sliced lemons and oranges floating in it fall out into the glasses, and didn’t speak until he’d put the pitcher down and taken his seat again.

“When you write it down…” he said. “Does that make it—whatever it is—real again? Or does the act of putting it into words make it unreal? You know, something…separate from yourself.” What had happened at El Morro had taken place mere hours before, and yet it seemed like years. But the scent of blood and guns hung about him like a shroud, and his muscles still twitched with the memory of desperate exertion.

His own words brought back to him the letters he had written now and then. The phantoms, as he thought of them: letters he’d written to Jamie Fraser—honest, conversational, heartfelt, and very real. No less real because he’d burned them all.

His mother looked at him in surprise, then took a meditative sip of the cool spiced wine.

“Both,” she said at last. “It’s completely real to me as I write it—and should I go back to read it again later, it’s real again.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “I can live in it,” she said softly. She finished her wine—the glasses were small, the sort of cup called a shot glass because the heavy base made it possible to slam it on the table with a loud report at the conclusion of a toast—and carefully poured more.

“But when it’s done, and I leave it…” She sipped again, the scent of red wine and oranges softening the smells of travel and sickness in her clothes. “It…seems somehow to separate itself from me. I can set it—whatever it was, whatever it is—aside in my mind then, just as I set aside the page.”

“How very useful,” John murmured, half to himself, thinking that he must try that. The wine was dissolving his own sense of sorrow and exhaustion—if only temporarily. The room grew peaceful around them, candlelight warm on the plastered walls, the wings of angels.

“But as to why—” His mother refilled his glass, and hers again.

“It’s a duty. The book—should it be a book—I’ll have it printed and bound, but privately. It’s for you and the other boys, for the children—for Cromwell and Seraphina,” she added softly, and her lips quivered for an instant.

“Mother,” he said quietly, and laid his hand on hers. She bent her head and put her free hand on his, and he saw how the tendrils of her hair, still thick, once blond like his own but mostly silver now, escaped from their plait and curled on her neck.

“A duty,” she said, holding his hand between her own. “The duty of a survivor. Not everyone lives to be old, but if you do, I think you owe it to those who didn’t. To tell the stories of those who shared your journey…for as long as they could.”

She closed her eyes and two tears ran down her cheeks.

He put his arm around her and drew her head down on his shoulder, and they sat silently together, waiting for the light to come back.





AUTHOR’S NOTE





Whale Oil


WHALE OIL VERSUS spermaceti. Now, see, I actually read the entirety of the infamous “list of whales” chapter of Moby-Dick and thought it was hilarious. But I admit that I was (at one point in a highly checkered career) a marine biologist, so I may have been slightly more aligned with Melville’s frame of reference than is the casual modern reader, who might be inclined to think of whale oil as being the same thing as spermaceti (assuming the CMR to be sufficiently widely read as to have encountered “spermaceti” in print at all).

In fact, though, these are two completely different (though equally combustible) substances. Whale oil is rendered from the flensed blubber of slaughtered whales. In other words, it’s the liquefied body fat of something that feeds mostly on small crustaceans. Body chemistry being what it is, an organism that stores energy in body fat also tends to store iffy chemicals it encounters in the same depository.

Your own body, for instance, stores excess hormones in your body fat, as well as various toxic or otherwise dubious compounds like PBCs, strontium, and insecticides.

The point here is that dead crustaceans are rather pungent. Think of the last time you left a package of thawed frozen shrimp in your refrigerator for a week. These aromatic compounds are stored in the body fat of things that eat the organism that makes them.

I first encountered this phenomenon when I had a postdoctoral appointment in which my principal job was dissecting gannets. These are big diving seabirds (related to boobies) that feed largely on squid. Their body fat smells like rotting squid, especially when you put it in a drying oven in order to desiccate it. So if you’re burning whale oil in your lamps (it was cheap, as Tom Byrd notes), your establishment is probably going to smell like week-old krill. And, being fat, it makes smoke when you burn it.