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It was true that he spoke French very well—languages came easy to him—and
Rab MacNab’s
“Yes, he—” He stopped, staring at her. “You’ve met my brother?”
“I see you even shit with style, Your Grace,”
“Oh, the cloth?” Hal said, weakly but clearly. “That’s Dottie. She will not go out, even though I assured her that if I thought I was going to die, I should certainly wait for her return to do it.” He paused to breathe, with a faint wheezing note, then coughed and went on: “She is not the sort, thank God, to indulge in pieties, she has no musical talent, and her vitality is such that she is a menace to the kitchen staff. So Minnie set her to needlework, as some outlet for her formidable energies. She takes after Mother, you know.”
I believe she is at work this moment on a pair of carpet slippers for you.” Grey thought carpet slippers were likely innocuous, whatever motif she had chosen, and said so. “So long as she isn’t embroidering a pair of drawers for me. The knotwork, you know …” That made Hal laugh, which in turn made him cough alarmingly, though it brought a little color back into his face. “So you aren’t dying?” Grey asked. “No,” Hal said shortly. “Good,” said Grey, smiling at his brother. “Don’t.”
a second Bottle of the convent’s Claret [the Nuns make it themselves, and from the Shade of the priest’s Nose, no little of it gets consumed here,
We had a Guide for our Journey between St. John and Quebec, a Man of mixed Blood (he had a most remarkable Head of Hair, thick and curly as Sheep’s Wool and the color of Cinnamon Bark)
I hate Boats. I despise them with the utmost Fiber of my Being.
He had to stop again, as pain was radiating through his hand and up his wrist. He stretched the fingers, stifling a groan; a hot wire seemed to stab from his fourth finger up his forearm in brief electric jolts.
still rubbing his hand. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” said his personal figurehead, appearing suddenly beside him with an expression of marked concern. “Your hand!” “Aye?” He looked down at it, cross with discomfort. “What’s amiss? All my fingers are still attached to it.” “That’s the most that could be said for it. It looks like the Gordian knot.” She knelt down beside him and took the hand into hers, massaging it in a forceful way that was doubtless helpful but so immediately painful that it made his eyes water. He closed them, breathing slowly through clenched teeth. She was scolding him for
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“I wanted to,” he said. She said something derogatory under her breath, in which the words “Scot” and “pigheaded” featured, but he chose to take no notice. He had wanted to; it clarified his thoughts to put them down in black and white, and it was to some degree a relief to express them on paper, rather than to have the worry clogged up in his head like mud in mangrove roots.
And beyond that—not that he required an excuse, he thought, narrowing his eyes at the top of his wife’s bent head—seeing the shore of North Carolina drop away had made him lonely for his daughter and Roger Mac, and he’d wanted the sense of connection that writing to them gave him.
So far as Fergus and Marsali and the folk on the Ridge were concerned, Brianna and Roger Mac had gone to France to escape the oncoming war.
“I miss them, too,” she said quietly, and kissed his knuckles. “Give me the letter; I’ll finish it.”
The wind’s come up a bit, and the water’s getting rough. Your father has gone rather pale and clammy, like fish bait; I’ll close and take him down below for a nice quiet vomit and a nap, I think.
six margarine tubs full of God knew what; he’d lay odds it wasn’t margarine.
Mandy was the most independent three-year-old he’d ever seen. Which was saying something, considering that he’d also seen Jem at that age.
“You sound like your mother. Making a diagnosis.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t. Bree resembled her father physically to such a degree that he seldom saw Claire in her, but the calm ruthlessness in her questions was Claire Beauchamp to the life. So was the slight arch of one brow, waiting for an answer.
Pocket Principles of Health, it was entitled, by C. E. B. R. Fraser, M.D. A limited edition, produced by A. Bell, Printer, Edinburgh.
Moved by impulse, he opened the book and nearly choked. The frontispiece, in customary eighteenth-century style, showed an engraving of the author. A medical man, in a neat tiewig and black coat, with a high black stock. From above which his mother-in-law’s face looked serenely out at him. He laughed out loud, causing Annie Mac to peer cautiously in at him, in case he might be having a fit of some kind, as well as talking to himself. He waved her off and shut the door before returning to the book. It was her, all right. The wide-spaced eyes under dark brows, the graceful firm bones of cheek,
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Was there a picture of Jamie in the other …? He seized it and flipped it open. Sure enough, another steel-point engraving, though this was a more homely drawing. His father-in-law sat in a wing chair, his hair tied simply back, a plaid draped over the chair behind him, and a book open upon his knee. He was reading to a small child sitting upon his other knee—a little girl with dark curly hair. She was turned away, absorbed in the story. Of course—the engraver couldn’t have known what Mandy’s face would look like. Grandfather Tales, the book was titled, with the subtitle, “Stories from the
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Jem had noticed a large rat scurrying into a hole under the school’s foundation. He had brought a bit of twine with him next day, set a snare just before going in to the first lesson, and gone out at the recess to retrieve his prey, which he had then proceeded to skin in a businesslike manner, to the admiration of his male classmates and the horror of the girls.
Evidently he was taking to the heather, in the time-honored manner of Highland outlaws. It was the thought of Highland outlaws that made the penny drop. Jem was heading for the Dunbonnet’s cave.
Jamie Fraser had lived there for seven years after the catastrophe of Culloden, almost within sight of his home but hidden from Cumberland’s soldiers—and protected by his tenants, who never used his name aloud but called him “the Dunbonnet,” for the color of the knitted Highland bonnet he wore to conceal his fiery hair. That same hair flashed like a beacon, halfway up the slope, before disappearing again behind a rock.
Jem remembered. But Jem—he’d taken one look at the automobiles on the road they’d reached half an hour after their emergence from the stones on Ocracoke and stood transfixed, a huge grin spreading across his face as the cars whizzed past him. “Vroom,” he’d said contentedly to himself, the trauma of separation and time travel—Roger had himself barely been able to walk, feeling that he had left a major and irretrievable piece of himself trapped in the stones—apparently forgotten.
Brianna had said the cave was on the south face of the hill, about forty feet above a large whitish boulder known locally as “Leap o’ the Cask.” So known because the Dunbonnet’s servant, bringing ale to the hidden laird, had encountered a group of British soldiers and, refusing to give them the cask he carried, had had his hand cut off— “Oh, Jesus,” Roger whispered. “Fergus. Oh, God, Fergus.” Could see at once the laughing, fine-boned face, dark eyes snapping with amusement as he lifted a flapping fish with the hook he wore in place of his missing left hand—and the vision of a small, limp
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“Well … I was already fussed wi’ Jimmy, and when she grabbed me like that, it hurt bad. And … well, my dander got up,” he said, giving Roger a blue-eyed look of burning righteousness that was so much his grandfather that Roger nearly smiled, despite the situation.
Drawn by the shouting, Mr. Menzies had emerged onto the play yard just in time to hear Jem giving Miss Glendenning the benefit of some of his grandfather’s best Gaelic curses, at the top of his lungs.
I left, making my ginger way up the companionway ladder to the accompaniment of a lot of Gaelic muttering that I didn’t try to translate.
“Is your trust upon him?” I asked, in halting Gaelic. Ian gave me a mildly scandalized look. “Of course not,” he replied in the same language. “And you will oblige me by not going too close to him, wife of my mother’s brother. He says to me that he does not eat human flesh, but this is no surety that he is safe.”
That was one thing gained from the present situation: I’d left the horrid dead leper’s cloak aboard the Teal.
Another small benefit: a canister of good Darjeeling tea in the cupboard.
Ian’s brows went up at sight of his uncle thus attired, but Jamie glared at him, and Ian said nothing, though his expression lightened for the first time since we had met the Pitt.
Jamie was on the rail of the Pitt, gripping me by the waist to save me falling. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” he said, in tones of utter astonishment, and I looked over my shoulder to see him turned to watch the oncoming ship. “It’s the bloody Teal.”
JAMMF and JHRC, love it
“You haven’t any hesitation about this?” I said to Jamie. “I mean—after all, he is a dog.” He gave me an eye and a moody shrug. “Aye, well. I’ve known battles fought for worse reasons. And since this time yesterday, I’ve committed piracy, mutiny, and murder. I may as well add treason and make a day of it.” “Besides, Auntie,” Ian said reprovingly, “he’s a good dog.”
A very good dog🥺
I paused to kiss Jamie—a gesture he returned with a gusto that left my lower lip throbbing slightly—resolutely
The American (now speaking pleasantly about an unusual geological formation he had seen on his journey from Paris; had his lordship noticed it?)
“Things don’t bend quite so easily as they used to. And other things hurt. Sometimes I think I’m falling apart.” Jamie closed one eye and regarded me. “I’ve felt like that since I was about twenty,” he observed. “Ye get used to it.” He stretched, making his spine give off a series of muffled pops, and held out a hand. “Come to bed, a nighean. Nothing hurts when ye love me.” He was right; nothing did.
I had blamed both myself and Jamie.
“Uncle Jamie told me about the sperm ye showed him.
But it wasn’t your fault. Or hers.” Not mine. Nor Jamie’s. He nodded, slowly, and leaning forward, laid his head on my shoulder for a moment. “Thank ye, Auntie,” he whispered, and lifting his head, kissed my cheek.
He splashed hastily toward a tussock, sprang atop it, and crouched there like the toad-king,
The horse was shaking its head to and fro but had quit churning its legs. He seized the bridle and blew into the horse’s nostrils, talking calming nonsense. The horse snorted, spraying him with droplets, but seemed to collect itself.
The Horsewhisper, 2nd Generation🥹
“He said, ‘Keep thy fat-headed brother from committing suicide, for I will require his blood at thy hand,’ ” she snapped, slapping his hand away from the bridle. “If we are going to join the army, Denny, let us go and find it.”
William put the bear’s claw inside his shirt, where it hung safely concealed next to his rosary.
(The nice thing about belonging to an ad hoc army is that one apparently gets to design one’s own uniform. None of this stuffy old British convention about regimentals.)
Your father, who was standing next to the general at the time, said something under his breath in Gaelic at this point, but not very far under, and while I understand the general was born in Thurso, he conveniently affected not to understand.
I think General St. Clair will be almost as pleased as I will be when your father’s enlistment is up.
While my medical kit thus remains a little sparse, I have as some compensation acquired a ghoul.
