He drew back enough to shake me again.
“You’re mine, damn ye, Claire Fraser! Mine, and I wilna share ye, with a man or a memory, or anything whatever, so long as we both shall live. You’ll no mention the man’s name to me again. D’ye hear?” He kissed me fiercely to emphasize the point. “Did ye hear me?” he asked, breaking off.
“Yes,” I said, with some difficulty. “If you’d…stop…shaking me, I might…answer you.”
Rather sheepishly, he released his grip on my shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Sassenach. It’s only…God, why did ye…well, aye, I see why…but did you have to—” I interrupted this incoherent sputtering by putting my hand behind his head and drawing him down to me.
“Yes,” I said firmly, releasing him. “I had to. But it’s over now.” I loosened the ties of my cloak and let it fall back off my shoulders to the floor. He bent to pick it up, but I stopped him.
“Jamie,” I said. “I’m tired. Will you take me to bed?”
He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, staring down at me, eyes sunk deep with tiredness and strain.
“Aye,” he said softly, at last. “Aye, I will.”
He was silent, and rough at the start, the edges of his anger sharpening his love.
“Ooh!” I said, at one point.
“Christ, I’m sorry, mo duinne. I couldna…”
“It’s all right.” I stopped his apologies with my mouth and held him tightly, feeling the wrath ebb away as the tenderness grew between us. He didn’t break away from the kiss, but held himself motionless, gently exploring my lips, the tip of his tongue caressing, barely stroking.
I touched his tongue with my own, and held his face between my hands. He hadn’t shaved since morning, and the faint red stubble rasped pleasantly beneath my fingertips.
He lowered himself and rolled slightly to one side, so as not to crush me with his weight, and we went on, touching all along our lengths, joined in closeness, speaking in silent tongues.
Alive, and one. We are one, and while we love, death will never touch us. “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace.” Alex Randall lay cold in his bed, and Mary Randall alone in hers. But we were here together, and no one and nothing mattered beyond that fact.
He grasped my hips, large hands warm on my skin, and pulled me toward him, and the shudder that went through me went through him, as though we shared one flesh.
I woke in the night, still in his arms, and knew he was not asleep.
“Go back to sleep, mo duinne.” His voice was soft, low and soothing, but with a catch that made me reach up to feel the wetness on his cheeks.
“What is it, love?” I whispered. “Jamie, I do love you.”
“I know it,” he said quietly. “I do know it, my own. Let me tell ye in your sleep how much I love you. For there’s no so much I can be saying to ye while ye wake, but the same poor words, again and again. While ye sleep in my arms, I can say things to ye that would be daft and silly waking, and your dreams will know the truth of them. Go back to sleep, mo duinne.”
I turned my head, enough that my lips brushed the base of his throat, where his pulse beat slow beneath the small three-cornered scar. Then I laid my head upon his chest and gave my dreams up to his keeping.
46
TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME
There were men and their traces all around, as we made our way north, following the retreat of the Highland army. We passed small groups of men on foot, walking doggedly, heads down against the windy rain. Others lay in the ditches and under the hedgerows, too exhausted to go on. Equipment and weapons had been abandoned along the way; here a wagon lay overturned, its sacks of flour split and ruined in the wet, there a brace of small culverin stood beneath a tree, twin barrels gleaming darkly in the shadows.
The weather had been bad all the way, delaying us. It was April 13, and I rode and walked with a constant, gnawing feeling of dread beneath my heart. Lord George and the clan chieftains, the Prince and his chief advisers—all were at Culloden House, or so we had been told by one of the MacDonalds that we met along the way. He knew little more than that, and we did not detain him; the man stumbled away into the mist, moving like a zombie. Rations had been short when I was captured by the English a month gone; matters had plainly gone from bad to worse. The men we saw moved slowly, many of them staggering with exhaustion and starvation. But they moved stubbornly north, all the same, following their Prince’s orders. Moving toward the place the Scots called Drumossie Moor. Toward Culloden.
At one point, the road became too bad for the faltering ponies. They would have to be led around the outer edge of a small wood, through the wet spring heather, to where the road became passable, a half-mile beyond.