Written in My Own Heart's Blood

He gave a small snort of what might have been amusement. I yanked at my hand, but he wouldn’t let go.

“I said what I meant, Sassenach,” he said, tightening his grip on my hand, and augmenting it with another hand on my forearm, preventing me from rising. “Ye think wi’ your body. It’s what makes ye a surgeon, no?”

“I—oh.” Overcoming my dudgeon momentarily, I was obliged to admit that there was something in this observation.

“Possibly,” I said stiffly, looking away from him. “But I don’t think that’s what you meant.”

“Not entirely, no.” There was a very slight edge to his voice again, but I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Listen to me.”

I sat stubbornly silent for a moment, but he simply held on, and I knew that he was more stubborn by nature than I could be if I worked at it for a hundred years. I was going to hear what he had to say—and I was going to tell him what he wanted to hear—whether I liked it or not.

“I’m listening,” I said. He drew breath and relaxed a little but didn’t lessen his grip.

“I’ve taken ye to bed a thousand times at least, Sassenach,” he said mildly. “Did ye think I wasna paying attention?”

“Two or three thousand at least,” I said, in the interests of strict accuracy, staring at the digging knife I’d dropped on the ground. “And no.”

“Well, then. I ken what ye’re like in bed. And I see—all too well,” he added, his mouth compressing momentarily, “—how this likely was.”

“No, you bloody don’t,” I said warmly.

He made another Scottish noise, this one indicating hesitation.

“I do,” he said, but carefully. “When I lost ye, after Culloden—I kent ye weren’t dead, but that made it all the worse, if ye ask me … eh?”

I had made a noise of my own but gestured briefly at him to go on.

“I told ye about Mary MacNab, aye? How she came to me, in the cave?”

“Several years after the fact,” I said rather coldly. “But, yes, you did get round to it eventually.” I gave him a look. “I certainly didn’t blame you for that—and I didn’t ask you for the gory details, either.”

“No, ye didn’t,” he admitted. He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a knuckle. “Maybe ye weren’t jealous. I am.” He hesitated. “I’d tell ye, though—how it was—if ye wanted to know.”

I looked at him, biting my lip dubiously. Did I want to know? If I didn’t—and I wasn’t at all sure whether I did or not—would he take that as evidence that I didn’t care? And I was quite conscious of that brief “I am.”

I took a deep breath, accepting the implied bargain.

“Tell me,” I said. “How it was.”

Now he did look away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.

“It … was tender,” he said quietly, after a moment. “Sad.”

“Sad,” I echoed. “How?”

He didn’t look up but kept his eyes fixed on the flowers, following the movements of a big black bumblebee among the furled blooms.

“Both of us mourning things that were lost,” he said slowly, brows drawn down in thought. “She said she meant to keep ye alive for me, to let me … to let me imagine it was you, I suppose she meant.”

“Didn’t work quite that way?”

“No.” He looked up then, straight on, and his eyes went through me like a rapier through a scarecrow. “There couldna be anyone like you.”

It wasn’t said with an air of compliment, more one of flat finality—or, even, of resentment.

I lifted a shoulder briefly. There wasn’t much response I could make.

“And?”

He sighed and looked back at his knotted hands. He was squeezing the fingers of his narrowed right hand with his left, as though to remind himself of the missing finger.

“It was quiet,” he said to his thumb. “We didna talk, really, not once we’d … begun.” He closed his eyes, and I wondered, with a small twinge of curiosity, just what he saw. I was surprised to realize that curiosity was all I felt—with, perhaps, pity for them. I’d seen the cave in which they’d made love, a cold granite tomb, and I knew how desperate the state of things had been in the Highlands then. Just the promise of a little human warmth … “Both of us mourning things that were lost,” he’d said.

“It was just the once. It didna last very long; I—it had been a long time,” he said, and a faint flush showed across his cheekbones. “But … I needed it, verra much. She held me after, and … I needed that more. I fell asleep in her arms; she was gone when I woke. But I carried the warmth of her with me. For a long time,” he said very softly.

That gave me a quite unexpected stab of jealousy, and I straightened a little, fighting it back with clenched hands. He sensed it and turned his head toward me. He’d felt that flame ignite—and had one to match it.

“And you?” he said, giving me a hard, direct look.

“It wasn’t tender,” I said with an edge. “And it wasn’t sad. It should have been. When he came into my room and said he wouldn’t mourn you alone, and we talked, then I got up and went to him, expecting—if I had so much as an expectation; I don’t think I had any conscious thoughts… .”

“No?” He matched my edge with his own. “Blind drunk, were ye?”

“Yes, I bloody was, and so was he.” I knew what he was thinking; he wasn’t making any effort to hide it, and I had a sudden, vivid recollection of sitting with him in the corner of a tavern in Cross Creek, his taking my face suddenly between his hands and kissing me, and the warm sweetness of wine passing from his mouth to mine. I sprang to my feet and slapped my hand on the bench.

“Yes, I bloody was!” I said again, furious. “I was drunk every damned day since I heard you were dead.”

He drew a deep, deep breath, and I saw his eyes fix on his hands, clenched on his knees. He let it out very slowly.

“And what did he give ye, then?”

“Something to hit,” I said. “At least to begin with.”

He looked up at me, startled.

“Ye hit him?”

“No, I hit you,” I snapped. My fist had curled, without my realization, clenched against my thigh. I remembered that first blow, a blind, frenzied punch into unwary flesh, all the force of my grief behind it. The flex of recoil that took away the sensation of warmth for an instant, brought it back with a smash that flung me onto the dressing table, borne down by a man’s weight, his grip tight on my wrists, and me screaming in fury. I didn’t remember the specifics of what came next—or, rather, I recalled certain things very vividly but had no idea of the order in which they happened.

“It was a blur,” people say. What they really mean is the impossibility of anyone truly entering such an experience from outside, the futility of explanation.

“Mary MacNab,” I said abruptly. “She gave you … tenderness, you said. There should be a word for what this was, what John gave me, but I haven’t thought of it yet.” I needed a word that might convey, encapsulate.

“Violence,” I said. “That was part of it.” Jamie stiffened and gave me a narrow look. I knew what he was thinking and shook my head. “Not that. I was numb—deliberately numb, because I couldn’t bear to feel. He could; he had more courage than I did. And he made me feel it, too. That’s why I hit him.”

I’d been numb, and John had ripped off the dressing of denial, the wrappings of the small daily necessities that kept me upright and functioning; his physical presence had torn away the bandages of grief and showed what lay below: myself, bloody and unhealed.

I felt the air thick in my throat, damp and hot and itching on my skin. And finally I found the word.

“Triage,” I said abruptly. “Under the numbness, I was … raw. Bloody. Ski

He’d stopped it by slapping his own grief, his own fury, over the welling blood of mine. Two wounds, pressed together, blood still flowing freely—but no longer lost and draining, flowing instead into another body, and the other’s blood into mine, hot, searing, not welcome—but life.