“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 Channel to France, and to refuge in the Abbey of Ste. Anne de Beaupré, where one of his Fraser uncles was abbot. But once there in safety, I had found that saving his life was not the end of the task set me.
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.”
Brianna was shaking her head slowly back and forth, bewildered, but with a stubborn set to her head that I knew very well indeed. “Grahams are stupid, Campbells are deceitful, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Frasers are stubborn,” Jamie had told me once, giving me his view of the general characteristics of the clans. He hadn’t been far wrong, either; Frasers were extremely stubborn, not least him. Nor Bree.
“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 Brianna. “He couldn’t believe the truth, but he knew—of course—that he wasn’t your father. He asked me not to tell you—to let him be your only father—as long as he lived. After that, he said, it was up to me.” I swallowed, licking dry lips.
“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.”