Dragonfly In Amber

I remembered my abortive efforts to escape from Castle Leoch. And then the day when I had told Jamie the truth, and he – not believing, any more than Frank had, but at least willing to act as though he did – had taken me back to the hill and the stones.

“He thought I was a witch, perhaps,” I said, eyes closed, smiling just a bit at the thought. “Now they think you’re mad; then they thought you were a witch. Cultural mores,” I explained, opening my eyes. “Psychology is just what they call it these days instead of magic. Not the hell of a lot of difference.” Roger nodded, seeming a little stu

“They tried me for witchcraft,” I said. “In the village of Cranesmuir, just below the castle. Jamie saved me, though, and then I told him. And he took me to the hill, and told me to go back. Back to Frank.” I paused and drew a deep breath, remembering that October afternoon, where control of my destiny, taken from me for so long, had been suddenly thrust back into my hands, and the choice not given, but demanded of me.

“Go back!” he had said. “There’s nothing here for ye! Nothing save danger.”

“Is there really nothing here for me?” I had asked. Too honorable to speak, he had answered nonetheless, and I had made my choice.

“It was too late,” I said, staring down at my hands, lying open on my knees. The day was darkening to rain, but my two wedding rings still gleamed in the fading light, gold and silver. I hadn’t taken Frank’s gold band from my left hand when I married Jamie, but had worn Jamie’s silver ring on the fourth finger of my right hand, for every day of the twenty-odd years since he put it there.

“I loved Frank,” I said quietly, not looking at Bree. “I loved him a lot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t,” I said, raising my head suddenly to Bree in appeal. She stared back at me, stone-faced.

I looked down at my hands again, and went on.

“He took me to his own home – Lallybroch, it was called. A beautiful place.” I shut my eyes again, to get away from the look on Bria

“Jamie was an outlaw,” I said, seeing behind my closed eyelids the scars of flogging that the English had left on his back. A network of thin white lines that webbed the broad shoulders like a branded grid. “There was a price on his head. One of his own tenants betrayed him to the English. They captured him, and took him to Wentworth Prison – to hang him.”

Roger gave a long, low whistle.

“Hell of a place,” he remarked. “Have you seen it? The walls must be ten feet thick!”

I opened my eyes. “They are,” I said wryly. “I’ve been inside them. But even the thickest walls have doors.” I felt a small flicker of the blaze of desperate courage that had taken me inside Wentworth Prison, in pursuit of my heart. If I could do that for you, I told Jamie silently, I can do this as well. But help me, you bloody big Scot – help me!

“I got him out,” I said, taking a deep breath. “What was left of him. Jack Randall commanded the garrison at Wentworth.” Now I didn’t want to remember the images that my words brought back, but they wouldn’t stop. Jamie, naked and bloody, on the floor of Eldridge Manor, where we had found sanctuary.

“I wilna let them take me back again, Sassenach,” he’d said to me, teeth clenched against the pain as I’d set the crushed bones of his hand and cleansed his wounds. “Sassenach.” He had called me that from the first; the Gaelic word for an outlander, a stranger. An Englishman. First in jest, and then in affection.

And I hadn’t let them find him; with the help of his kinsman, a little Fraser clansman called Murtagh, I’d gotten him across the Cha

What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I was not sure, even now, what I had done, when I had summoned his demons and fought them single-handed, in the dark of his mind; there is very little difference between medicine and magic, when it comes to some kinds of healing.

I could still feel the cold, hard stone that bruised me, and the strength of the fury that I had drawn from him, the hands that closed round my neck and the burning creature who had hunted me through the dark.

“But I did heal him,” I said softly. “He came back to me.”

Bria

“I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. She sat up straighter, eyeing me closely. “I think maybe you’ve been thinking too much about those men at Culloden,” she said. “After all, you’ve been under a strain lately, and maybe Daddy’s death…”

“Frank wasn’t your father,” I said bluntly.

“He was!” She flashed back with it immediately, so fast that it startled both of us.

Frank had, in time, bowed to the doctors’ insistence that any attempt to “force me to accept reality,” as one of them put it, might be harmful to my pregnancy. There had been a lot of murmuring in corridors – and shouting, now and then – but he had given up asking me for the truth. And I, in frail health and sick at heart, had given up telling it to him.

I wasn’t going to give up, this time.

“I promised Frank,” I said. “Twenty years ago, when you were born. I tried to leave him, and he wouldn’t let me go. He loved you.” I felt my voice soften as I looked at Bria

“I owed him that,” I said. “Because he loved you. But now Frank’s dead – and you have a right to know who you are.”

“If you doubt it,” I said, “go to the National Portrait Gallery. They’ve a picture there of Ellen MacKenzie; Jamie’s mother. She’s wearing these.” I touched the pearl necklace at my throat. A string of baroque freshwater pearls from Scottish rivers, strung with roundels of pierced gold. “Jamie gave them to me on our wedding day.”

I looked at Bria

Roger stared at Bria

“I’ve something I think you should see,” he said firmly. He crossed quickly to the Reverend’s old rolltop desk and pulled a rubber-banded bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings from one of the pigeonholes.

“When you’ve read them, look at the dates,” he told Bria