I was seeing it again, as vivid in my mind’s eye as it had been in the shadows of my bed at L’Hôpital des Anges, when I had miscarried Faith and been dying of puerperal fever. When Master Raymond had laid his hands on me and I had seen the bones in my arm glow blue through my flesh.
I dropped that vision like a hot plate and realized that Roger was gripping my hand.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.
“I’m not scared,” I said, half truthfully. “Just shocked. I hadn’t thought about it in years.”
“It scared the shit out of me,” he said frankly, and let go of my hand. “After he did what he did to Buck’s heart, I was afraid to talk to him, but I knew I had to. And when I touched him—to stop him, you know; I was following him up a path—he froze. And then he turned round and put his hand on my chest”—his own hand rose, unconsciously, and rested on his chest—“and he said the same thing to me that I’d heard him say to Buck: ‘Cognosco te.’ It means, ‘I know you,’” he clarified, seeing the blank look on my face. “In Latin.”
“He knew—what you were—just by touching you?” The oddest feeling was rippling over my shoulders and down my arms. Not exactly fear … but something like awe.
“Yes. I couldn’t tell about him,” he added hastily. “I didn’t feel anything strange, just then, but I was watching closely, earlier, when he put his hand on Buck’s chest—Buck had some sort of heart attack when we came through the stones—”
“He came with you and Bree and—”
Now Roger made the same helpless gesture.
“No, this was … earlier. Anyway, Buck was in a bad way, and the people who’d taken him in had sent for a doctor, this Hector McEwan. And he laid his hand on Buck’s chest and—and did wee things—and I saw—I really did, Claire, I saw it—a faint blue light come up through his fingers and spread over his hand.”
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.”
He laughed.
“Aye. Exactly. Nobody else could see it, though,” he added, laughter fading out of his face. “Only me.”
I rubbed the palms of my hands slowly together, imagining it.
“Buck,” I said. “I assume he survived? Since you asked if we’d seen him.”
Roger’s face changed at that, a shadow passing behind his eyes.
“He did. Then. But we—separated, after I found Bree and the kids … It’s …”
“A long story,” I finished for him. “Maybe it should wait until Jamie and Bree come back from their hunting. But about this Dr. McEwan—did he tell you anything about—the blue light?” The words felt strange to say, and yet I could envision it; my palms tingled slightly at the thought, and I looked down at them involuntarily. No, still pink.
Roger was shaking his head. “Not much, no. Not in words. But—he put his hand on my throat.” His own hand rose, touching the ragged scar left by the hangman’s rope. “And … something happened,” he said softly.
4
The Women Will Ha’ a Fit
“WOULD YE COME ASIDE to the cabin, cousin?” Ian said, looking uncharacteristically shy. “In case Rachel might be back. I’d … like ye to meet her.”
“I’d love to meet her,” Bree said, smiling at him, and meant it. She lifted an eyebrow at her father, but he nodded.
“It will be good to put this lot down for a bit,” he said, wiping a sleeve across his perspiring face. “And if ye milked the goats as your mother asked ye to this morning, Ian, I wouldna say no to a cup of it, either.” He and Ian were carrying the usable remains of the deer, bound into an unwieldy package inside the mostly intact skin and hanging from a stout pole that they bore across their shoulders. It was a hot day.
Someone was home at the cabin in the aspen grove. The door stood open, and there was a small spinning wheel standing on the front stoop amid the darting leaf shadows and a chair beside it with a flat basket piled with brown and gray puffs of what Brianna assumed must be combed clean wool. There was no sign of the spinner, but women were singing inside the house, in Gaelic—breaking off every few bars in laughter, with one clear voice then singing the line over again, and the second after it, stumbling over an occasional word, then laughing again.
Jamie smiled, hearing it.
“Jenny’s teachin’ wee Rachel the Gàidhlig,” he said, unnecessarily. “Set it down here, Ian.” He nodded at the pool of shade under a fallen log. “The women will ha’ a fit if we bring flies into the house.”
Someone in the house had heard them, for the singing stopped and a head poked out of the open door.
“Ian!” A tallish, very pretty dark-haired girl popped out and hopped off the porch, grabbing Ian round the middle in exuberant embrace, this instantly returned. “Thy cousins have come! Does thee know?”
“Aye, I do,” he said, kissing her mouth. “Come say hello to my cousin Brianna, mo ghràidh. Oh—and Uncle Jamie, too,” he added, turning round.
Bree was already smiling, moved by the obvious love between the young Murrays, and glancing at her father she saw the same smile on his face. Saw it broaden as he looked beyond them to the open door, where a small woman had come out, a baby wearing nothing but a clout in her arms.
“Who—” she began, and then her eyes fell on Brianna, and her mouth dropped open.
“Blessed Bride protect us,” she said mildly, but her eyes were warm, blue, and slanted like Jamie’s, smiling up at Brianna. “The giants have come. And your husband, too, they say, and him even taller than yourself, lass. And ye’ve bairns, too, they say—all of them springin’ up like weeds, I reckon?”
“Toadstools,” Bree said, laughing, and bent down to hug her diminutive aunt. Jenny smelled of goats, fresh wool, porridge, and toasted yeast bread, and a faint scent in her hair and clothes that Bree had long forgotten but recognized instantly as the soap Jenny had made at Lallybroch, with honey and lavender and a Highland herb that had no name in English.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said, and felt tears well in her eyes, for the soap brought back Lallybroch as she’d first seen it—and with that ghost, another, stronger one behind it: the ghost of her own Lallybroch.
She blinked back the tears and straightened up, a tremulous smile pasted on her face. This vanished at once, though, as she remembered.
“Oh, Auntie! I’m so sorry. About Uncle Ian, I mean.” A new wave of loss washed through her. Even though Ian Murray the elder had been dead all of her life, save for a few brief years, and she had met him only once, the loss seemed fresh and shocking now.
Jenny looked down, patting the baby’s tender back. He had a downy head of brown-blond fuzz, like a guinea hen’s chick.
“Ach,” she said softly. “My Ian’s wi’ me still. I can see him in this wee’un’s face, clear as day.”
She turned the baby deftly so he rested on her hip, looking up at Brianna with big round eyes—eyes the same warm light brown of her cousin Ian—and his father.
“Oh,” Brianna said, charmed and comforted at once. She reached out a tentative hand and offered the baby a finger. “And your name is … Oggy?”