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November 23 - December 10, 2021
Jamie wasn’t dying or in any immediate danger of doing so. Everything else could be handled, and true to form, he was doing just that, even flat on his back and too weak to sit up by himself.
“You’re to drink this,” she said firmly. “One full cup each hour. She said so.” The “She” was spoken with the respect due to the local deity, and his smile got better.
It was only moderately horrible and Frances, the dear child, had evidently taken Claire’s direction “with a little whisky” not only literally but liberally.
He was interested to see that she handled his body without the slightest hesitation or compunction, pressing here and there beside the line of stitching, a small frown between her soft dark brows.
“She thinks it’s him? Who else might it be?”
“Sasannaich clann na galladh!” “What does that mean?” “English sons of the devil,”
“I’m never going to lie with a man,” she said with complete certainty, then looked at him, with a little less. “You said I didn’t have to.” “Ye don’t and ye never will,” he assured her. “If anyone tries, I’ll kill him.
She's another feisty little thing and much like with Claire and Amanda, Jamie's all for it!
“She told him. Yesterday. He asked her to marry him and she said she couldn’t, because…”
So it was a couple issue, just not the couple I thought🥴
I got to my feet and edged crabwise down the slope until I was in conversational range of the stranger—and Oliver, whose eyes were squinched shut, but who was plainly conscious and wishing he weren’t. “Having you dead would solve a good many problems,” I told him. “But I’m told that two wrongs don’t make a right.” “Really?” said the Indian, smiling. “Who told you that?”
“Oh, there ye are, Auntie,” said Young Ian, his face lighting at sight of me. “I thought I heard your voice!”
“It is my pleasure, honored witch.”
“Dinna fash, Missus,” Kenny said, wiping the back of his hand under his big red nose. “My wife can see to them until the rain stops. You’d best go home before Himself has an apoplexy, if he hasna already done it.”
I guess Kenny remarried after Rosalyn died
“He hasn’t got enough blood left for a good apoplexy,” I said,
“Here,” said a familiar voice beside me, and Jenny handed me a canteen. “Drink it all, a leannan, there’s no much left.” Despite being so wet externally, I was parched with thirst and gulped the contents, which seemed to be a dilute spiced wine mixed with honey and water. It was divine and I handed back the empty canteen, now in sufficient possession of myself as to look round.
“Ye’ll have a wee cabin to live in with your mam,” she assured them. “And no man will trouble her, ever again. My brother will see to it.”
“I see,” I said, and thought I probably did. Jamie had told me, very briefly, about the Quaker widow who had taken care of him for a day or two when his back had seized up while he was in her house, having met there with George Washington—and I did wonder what the hell George Washington had been doing there, but hadn’t asked, owing to the press of events at the time.
“His name is Hunter James Ohston’ha Okhkwaho Murray. ‘James’ for his great-uncle, of course,” she added.
“Lyin’ to wee lassies, is it, Uncle?” Ian said with a grin. “Ye can go to hell for that sort o’ thing, I hear.” “And where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?” I demanded of Jamie. He didn’t answer. I didn’t think he’d even heard me. His face suffused with delight at sight of Ian and he stood up. Then his eyes rolled up and he turned dead white and fell with a crash that shook the floor.
Claire was repairing some stitches that had apparently torn loose when he fell over, but he was too happy to be bothered about either the needle or the scolding he was plainly about to get.
Ach, Jesus!” Claire had reached the end of her stitching and without a word of warning had sloshed a cupful of her disinfectant solution over the raw wound. Wordless only because he couldn’t say the words that came to his tongue in front of Rachel, Frances, and Agnes, he panted through the blinding sting. The women were looking at him with expressions ranging from sympathy to strong condemnation,
They sat, he propped up on his pillows and she on her stool, and looked at each other for some moments. “Thee does not seem in much better case than thee did when last I saw thee, Friend,” she said at last. Her voice was hoarse, and she cleared her throat.
“No,” Jamie said mildly. “Does it matter? Ye took me in without question and tended me—will ye not let me do the same for you?”
“Well, then,” he said, and letting go of her hand, patted it. “Thee has come home, Friend.”
He’d declined with grace, though, saying that he would remain with the wolves for now—that, apparently, being his term for the miscellaneous Murrays. I wasn’t sure whether he was drawn by having Ian to speak Mohawk with—or by Jenny.
“Honored witch,”
Twice now! This kills me💀😂💀🤣
Assuming any of the Highlanders on the Ridge would try one. Having grown up in a food-deprived habitat where oatmeal was not just for breakfast, most of the older people were deeply suspicious of anything strange-looking or unfamiliar—particularly things of a vegetable nature.
He nodded at once and offered me his arm, calico-shirted and ringed with silver bracelets, with as much style as Lord John or Hal might have done it, and I laughed, despite my unease.
“And…now you see ghosts?” Jenny had told me what he’d said about Ian the Elder and his leg. Raised every hair on my body, she’d said,
You have a small child sometimes near you, but she is very faint.
“What is strange,” he said as I rose, “is that this man often follows your husband, too.”
I opened the book, read a page without taking in a word of its meaning, and closed it again. It didn’t bloody matter. Whether by Frank’s intent—malign or not—or only a figment of Jamie’s imagination, stimulated by the pressure of current events or the stirrings of a mistaken sense of guilt…Jamie thought what he thought, and nothing short of Divine Revelation was likely to change that.
only a year ago!—when
Weeellllll nearly 2 now, Claire
For the first time, it occurred to me that even if Jamie was right, and Frank was making an attempt to tell him something—it might be a warning, rather than a threat.
“I wanted a coward, you know,” she said. “A man who’d stay away from danger and blood and all those things.” “And you thought I might be one?” He was curious, rather than offended.
WILLIAM STOOD STILL a moment longer, his arms round Amaranthus. He wasn’t guilty in this—well, not quite—and he declined to act as though he was.
WILLIAM WONDERED VAGUELY just how much brandy his father and uncle got through in a year. Beyond its social functions, brandy was the usual first resort of either man, faced with any crisis of either a physical, political, or emotional nature. And given their mutual profession, such crises were bound to occur regularly. William’s own first memory of having been given brandy dated from the age of five or so, when he had climbed up the stable ladder in order to get on the back of Lord John’s horse in its stall—something he was firmly forbidden to do—and had been promptly tossed off by the
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Once he’d got enough breath to scream with, there’d been a great fuss, his father and Mac the groom rushing down the stable aisle in a clatter of boots and calling out. Mac had crawled into the stall, speaking calmly to the horse in his own strange tongue, and pulled William out by the feet. Whereupon Lord John had quickly checked him for blood and broken bones, and finding none, smacked him a good one on the seat of his breeches, then pulled out a small flask and made him take a gulp of brandy for the shock. The brandy itself was nearly as big a shock, but after he’d got done wheeking and
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“Ist deine Bruder,” Henrike announced, throwing open the door. “Und his Indian.”
“That…” Cinnamon shook his head and blinked hard; she could see the tears he was keeping back and felt a wrench of sympathetic feeling for him, though her joy at his response overwhelmed almost everything else. His own feeling overwhelmed him to such an extent that he turned suddenly to her and seized her in a crushing embrace. “Thank you!” he whispered into her hair. “Oh, thank you!”
HENRIKE, SUMMONED ANEW, fetched a bottle of wine and three glasses, and they drank the health of John Cinnamon and his portrait. “Can you drink the health of a portrait?” Brianna asked, doing it regardless. “Healthiest portrait I’ve ever seen,” William said, closing one eye and squinting at the painting through his glass of red wine. He turned and raised the glass to Brianna. “We can drink to the artist, though, if you’d rather?” “Huzzah!” Cinnamon said, raised his glass to Brianna, and drank it off at a gulp. His eyes were bright, his hair standing on end, and he couldn’t stop beaming,
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He looked briefly at first, as though not really caring, but then blinked, focused, walked closer—and broke into a wide grin. “Got her, didn’t I?” Brianna said, laughing. That was the expression on the face of every man who met Angelina in the flesh.
“Lieutenant Hanson.” She swallowed, but knew her voice would shake. She spoke anyway. “When he—when he stopped. Afterward, when the rain started and we were all coming away from the tent? He said—I can’t say it, it was Polish…” “Pozegnanie,” William said quietly. “Farewell.” She nodded, and took a big breath. “That. It was the only thing—just a glimpse—of who he was.” She blinked, then knuckled away the tears that had oozed out. She cleared her throat and looked at the painting.
IN THE END, HE told her almost everything. No mention of cold gardens, warm thighs, and black-eyed toads. But everything else: Dottie and the baby, Denzell, General Raphael Fucking Bastard Bleeker, and Amaranthus’s account of her husband.
“Did I say I had any feelings for her?” he demanded irritably. “No, you didn’t.” You didn’t need to, you poor fool, her face said.
William could think of a lot of things she might do, but he’d already learned that his own imagination was not equal to that particular lady’s.
“No,” he said abruptly, and was startled when she laughed. “You think this situation is funny?” he said, suddenly furious. She shook her head and waved a hand in apology. “No. No, I’m sorry. It wasn’t the situation—it was the noise you made.” He stared at her, affronted. “What do you mean, noise?” “Mmphm.” “What?” “That noise you made in your throat—mmphm. You probably don’t want to hear this,” she added, with grossly belated tact, “but Da makes that sort of noise all the time, and you sounded…just like him.” He breathed through his teeth, biting back a number of remarks, none of them
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I painted it as though it was daylight, but it occurred to me that…”
Huh? Didn't she talk about night and firelight or candlelight??
