"What are ye doing here, Father?" he growled, mouth pressed to the priest's ear. "You're meant to be behind the lines."
A widening of the priest's eyes at this told Jamie the truth—the man of God, lost in the darkness, had thought he was behind the lines, and the belated realization that he was, in fact, in the vanguard of the advancing Highlanders, made him buckle slightly at the knees.
Jamie glanced backward; he didn't dare send the priest back through the lines. In the misty dark, he could easily stumble into an advancing Highlander, be mistaken for an enemy, and be killed on the spot. Gripping the smaller man by the back of the neck, he pushed him to his knees.
"Lie flat and stay that way until the firing stops," he hissed into the man's ear. The priest nodded frantically, then suddenly saw the body of the English soldier, lying on the ground a few feet away. He glanced up at Jamie in awed horror, and reached for the bottles of chrism and holy water that he wore at his belt in lieu of a dirk.
Rolling his eyes in exasperation, Jamie made a series of violent motions, meant to indicate that the man was not dead, and thus in no need of the priest's services. These failing to make their point, he bent, seized the priest's hand, and pressed the fingers on the Englishman's neck, as the simplest method of illustrating that the man was not in fact the first victim of the battle. Caught in this ludicrous position, he froze as a voice cut through the mist behind him.
"Halt!" it said. "Who goes there?"
"Have ye got a bit of water, Sassenach?" asked Jamie. "I'm gettin' a bit dry with the talking."
"Bastard!" I said. "You can't stop there! What happened?"
"Water," he said, grinning, "and I'll tell ye."
"All right," I said, handing him a water bottle and watching as he tilted it into his mouth. "What happened then?"
"Nothing," he said, lowering the bottle and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. "What did ye think, I was going to answer him?" He grinned impudently at me and ducked as I aimed a slap at his ear.
"Now, now," he reproved. "No way to treat a man wounded in the service of his King, now is it?"
"Wounded, are you?" I said. "Believe me, Jamie Fraser, a mere saber slash is as nothing compared to what I will do to you if…"
"Oh, threats, too, is it? What was that poem ye told me about, ‘When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel'…ow!"
"Next time, I twist it right off at the roots," I said, releasing the ear. "Get on with it, I have to go back in a minute."
He rubbed the ear gingerly, but leaned back against the wall and resumed his story.
"Well, we just sat there on our haunches, the padre and I, staring at each other and listening to the sentries six feet away. "What's that?" says the one, and me thinking can I get up in time to take him with my dirk before he shoots me in the back, and what about his friend? For I canna expect help from the priest, unless maybe it's a last prayer over my body."
There was a long, nerve-racking silence, as the two Jacobites squatted in the grass, hands still clasped, afraid to move enough even to let go.
"Ahhh, yer seein' things," came from the other sentry at last, and Jamie felt the shudder of relief run through the priest, as his damp fingers slid free. "Nothin' up there but furze bushes. Never mind, lad," the sentry said reassuringly, and Jamie heard the clap of a hand on a shoulder and the stamp of booted feet, trying to keep warm. "There's the damn lot of 'em, sure, and in this dark, they could be the whole bloody Highland army, for all you can see." Jamie thought he heard the breath of a smothered laugh from one of the "furze bushes," on the hillside within hearing.
He glanced at the crest of the hill, where the stars were beginning to dim. Less than ten minutes to first light, he judged. At which point, Johnnie Cope's troops would swiftly realize that the Highland army was not, as they thought, an hour's march away in the opposite direction, but already face-to-face with their front lines.
There was a noise to the left, in the direction of the sea. It was faint, and indistinct, but the note of alarm was clear to battle-trained ears. Someone, he supposed, had tripped over a furze bush.
"Hey?" The note of alarm was taken up by one of the sentries nearby. "What's happening?"
The priest would have to take care of himself, he thought. Jamie drew the broadsword as he rose, and with one long step, was within reach. The man was no more than a shape in the darkness, but distinct enough. The merciless blade smashed down with all his strength, and split the man's skull where he stood.
"Highlanders!" The shriek broke from the man's companion, and the second sentry sprang out like a rabbit flushed from a copse, bounding away into the fading dark before Jamie could free his weapon from its gory cleft. He put a foot on the fallen man's back and jerked, gritting his teeth against the unpleasant sensation of slack flesh and grating bone.
Alarm was spreading up and down the English lines; he could feel as much as hear it—an agitation of men rudely wakened, groping blindly for weapons, searching in all directions for the unseen threat.
Clanranald's pipers were behind to the right, but no signal as yet came for the charge. Continue the advance, then, heart pounding and left arm tingling from the death blow, belly muscles clenched and eyes straining through the waning dark, the spray of warm blood across his face going cold and sticky in the chill.
"I could hear them first," he said, staring off into the night as though still searching for the English soldiers. He bent forward, hugging his knees. "Then I could see, too. The English, wriggling over the ground like maggots in meat, and the men behind me. George McClure came up with me, and Wallace and Ross on the other side, and we were walkin' still, one pace at a time, but faster and faster, seein' the sassenaches breaking before us."
There was a dull boom off to the right; the firing of a single cannon. A moment later, another, and then, as though this were the signal, a wavering cry rose from the oncoming Highlanders.
"The pipes started then," he said, eyes closed. "I didna remember my musket 'til I heard one fire close behind me; I'd left it in the grass next to the priest. When it's like that, ye dinna see anything but the small bit that's happening round you.
"Ye hear a shout, and of a sudden, you're running. Slow, for a step or two, while ye free your belt, and then your plaid falls free and you're bounding, wi' your feet splashing mud up your legs and the chill of the wet grass on your feet, and your shirttails flying off your bare arse. The wind blows into your shirt and up your belly and out along your arms.…Then the noise takes ye and you're screaming, like runnin' down a hill yelling into the wind when you're a bairn, to see can ye lift yourself on the sound."
They rode the waves of their own shrieking onto the plain, and the force of the Highland charge crashed onto the shoals of the English army, smothering them in a boiling surge of blood and terror.
"They ran," he said softly. "One man stood to face me—all during the fight, only one. The others I took from behind." He rubbed a grimy hand over his face, and I could feel a fine tremor start somewhere deep inside him.
"I remember…everything," he said, almost whispering. "Every blow. Every face. The man lying on the ground in front of me who wet himself wi' fear. The horses screaming. All the stinks—black powder and blood and the smell of my own sweat. Everything. But it's like I was standin' outside, watching myself. I wasna really there." He opened his eyes and looked sidelong at me. He was bent almost double, head on his knees, the shivering visible now.
"D'ye know?" he asked.
"I know."
While I hadn't fought with sword or knife, I had fought often enough with hands and will; getting through the chaos of death only because there is no other choice. And it did leave behind that odd feeling of detachment; the brain seemed to rise above the body, coldly judging and directing, the viscera obediently subdued until the crisis passed. It was always sometime later that the shaking started.
I hadn't reached that point yet. I slid the cloak from my shoulders and covered him before going back into the cottage.
The dawn came, and relief with it, in the person of two village women and an army surgeon. The man with the wounded leg was pale and shaky, but the bleeding had stopped. Jamie took me by the arm and led me away, down the street of Tranent.
O'Sullivan's constant difficulties with the commissary had been temporarily relieved by the captured wagons, and there was food in plenty. We ate quickly, scarcely tasting the hot porridge, aware of food only as a bodily necessity, like breathing. The feeling of nourishment began to creep through my body, freeing me to think of the next most pressing need—sleep.
Wounded men were quartered in every house and cottage, the sound of body mostly sleeping in the fields outside. While Jamie could have claimed a place in the manse with the other officers, he instead took my arm and turned me aside, heading between the cottages and up a hill, into one of the scattered small groves that lay outside Tranent.
"It's a bit of a walk," he said apologetically, looking down at me, "but I thought perhaps ye'd rather be private."
"I would." While I had been raised under conditions that would strike most people of my time as primitive—often living in tents and mud houses on Uncle Lamb's field expeditions—still, I wasn't used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn't do together was bathe—largely because they didn't bathe.
Jamie led the way under the drooping limbs of a huge horse chestnut, and into a small clearing, thick with the fallen leaves of ash, alder, and sycamore. The sun was barely up, and it was still cold under the trees, a faint edge of frost rimming some of the yellowed leaves.
He scraped a rough trench in the layer of leaves with one heel, then stood at one end of the hollow, set his hand to the buckle of his belt, and smiled at me.
"It's a bit undignified to get into, but it's verra easy to take off." He jerked the belt loose, and his plaid dropped around his ankles, leaving him clad to mid-thigh in only his shirt. He usually wore the military "little kilt," which buckled about the waist, with the plaid a separate strip of cloth around the shoulders. But now, his own kilt rent and stained from the battle, he had acquired one of the older belted plaids—nothing more than a long strip of cloth, tucked about the waist and held in place with no fastening but a belt.
"How do you get into it?" I asked curiously.
"Well, ye lay it out on the ground, like this"—he knelt, spreading the cloth so that it lined the leaf-strewn hollow—"and then ye pleat it every few inches, lie down on it, and roll."
I burst out laughing, and sank to my knees, helping to smooth the thick tartan wool.
"That, I want to see," I told him. "Wake me up before you get dressed."
He shook his head good-naturedly, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves glinted off his hair.
"Sassenach, the chances of me wakin' before you do are less than those of a worm in a henyard. I dinna care if another horse steps on me, I'll no be moving 'til tomorrow." He lay down carefully, pushing back the leaves.
"Come lie wi' me." He extended an inviting hand upward. "We'll cover ourselves with your cloak."
The leaves beneath the smooth wool made a surprisingly comfortable mattress, though at this point I would cheerfully have slept on a bed of nails. I relaxed bonelessly against him, reveling in the exquisite delight of simply lying down.
The initial chill faded quickly as our bodies warmed the pocket where we lay. We were far enough from the town that the sounds of its occupation reached us only in wind-borne snatches, and I thought with drowsy satisfaction that it might well be tomorrow before anyone looking for Jamie found us.
I had removed my petticoats and torn them up for additional bandages the night before, and there was nothing between us but the thin fabric of skirt and shirt. A hard, solid warmth stirred briefly against my stomach.
"Surely not?" I said, amused despite my tiredness. "Jamie, you must be half-dead."
He laughed tiredly, holding me close with one large, warm hand on the small of my back.
"A lot more than half, Sassenach. I'm knackered, and my cock's the only thing too stupid to know it. I canna lie wi' ye without wanting you, but wanting's all I'm like to do."
I fumbled with the hem of his shirt, then pushed it up and wrapped my hand gently around him. Even warmer than the skin of his belly, his penis was silken under the touch of my stroking thumb, pulsing strongly with each beat of his heart.
He made a small sound of half-painful content, and rolled slowly onto his back, letting his legs sprawl loosely outward, half-covered by my cloak.
The sun had reached our pile of leaves, and my shoulders relaxed under the warming touch of the light. Everything seemed slightly tinged with gold, the mingled result of early autumn and extreme fatigue. I felt languid and vaguely disembodied, watching the small stirrings of his flesh under my fingers. All the terror and the tiredness and the noise of the two days past ebbed slowly away, leaving us alone together.
The haze of fatigue seemed to act as a magnifying glass, exaggerating tiny details and sensations. The tail of his saber wound was visible beneath the rucked-up shirt, crusted black against the fair skin. Two or three small flies buzzed low, investigating, and I waved them away. My ears rang with the silence, the breath of the trees no match for the echoes of the town.
I laid my cheek against him, feeling the hard, smooth curve of his hip bone, close under the skin. His skin was transparent in the crease of his groin, the branching veins blue and delicate as a child's.
His hand rose slowly, floating like the leaves, and rested lightly on my head.
"Claire. I need you," he whispered. "I need ye so."
Without the hampering petticoats, it was easy. I felt as though I were floating myself, rising without volition, drifting my skirts up the length of his body, settling over him like a cloud on a hilltop, sheltering his need.
His eyes were closed, head laid back, the red gold of his hair tumbled coarsely in the leaves. But his hands rose together and settled surely on my waist, resting without weight on the curve of my hips.
My eyes closed as well, and I felt the shapes of his mind, as surely as I felt those of his body under me; exhaustion blocked our every thought and memory; every sensation but the knowledge of each other.
"Not…long," he whispered. I nodded, knowing he felt what he did not see, and rose above him, thighs powerful and sure under the stained fabric of my gown.
Once, and twice, and again, and once again, and the tremor rose through him and through me, like the rising of water through the roots of a plant and into its leaves.
The breath left him in a sigh, and I felt his descent into unconsciousness like the dimming of a lamp. I fell beside him, with barely time to draw the heavy folds of the cloak up over us before the darkness filled me, and I lay weighted to the earth by the heavy warmth of his seed in my belly. We slept.
37
HOLYROOD
Edinburgh, October 1745
The knock on my door surprised me from an inspection of my newly replenished medical boxes. After the stunning victory at Prestonpans, Charles had led his triumphant army back to Edinburgh, to bask in adulation. While he was basking, his generals and chieftains labored, rallying their men and procuring what equipment was to be had, in preparation for whatever was coming next.
Buoyed by early success, Charles talked freely of taking Stirling, then Carlyle, and then, perhaps, of advancing south, even to London itself. I spent my spare time counting suture needles, hoarded willow bark, and stole every spare ounce of alcohol I could find, to be brewed into disinfectant.
"What is it?" I asked, opening the door. The messenger was a young boy, scarcely older than Fergus. He was trying to look grave and deferential, but couldn't suppress his natural curiosity. I saw his eyes dart around the room, resting on the large medicine chest in the corner with fascination. Clearly the rumors concerning me had spread through the palace of Holyrood.
"His Highness has asked for ye, Mistress Fraser," he answered. Bright brown eyes scanned me closely, no doubt looking for signs of supernatural possession. He seemed slightly disappointed at my depressingly normal appearance.
"Oh, has he?" I said. "Well, all right. Where is he, then?"
"In the morning drawing room, Mistress. I'm to take ye. Oh…" The thought struck him as he turned, and he swung back before I could close the door. "You're to bring your box of medicines, if ye'd be so kind."
My escort brimmed with self-importance at his mission as he escorted me down the long hallway to the Royal wing of the palace. Plainly someone had been schooling him in the behavior appropriate to a Royal page, but an occasional exuberant skip in his step betrayed his newness to the job.
What on earth did Charles want with me? I wondered. While he tolerated me on Jamie's account, the story of La Dame Blanche had plainly disconcerted him and made him uneasy. More than once, I had surprised him crossing himself surreptitiously in my presence, or making the quick two-fingered "horns" sign against evil. The idea that he would ask me to treat him medically was unlikely in the extreme.
When the heavy cross-timbered door swung open into the small morning drawing room, it seemed still more unlikely. The Prince, plainly in good health, was leaning on the painted harpsichord, picking out a hesitant tune with one finger. His delicate skin was mildly flushed, but with excitement, not fever, and his eyes were clear and attentive when he looked up at me.
"Mistress Fraser! How kind of you to attend me so shortly!" He was dressed this morning with even more lavishness than usual, bewigged and wearing a new cream-colored silk waistcoat, embroidered with flowers. He must be excited about something, I thought; his English went to pot whenever he became agitated.
"My pleasure, Your Highness," I said demurely, dropping a brief curtsy. He was alone, an unusual state of affairs. Could he want my medical services for himself after all?
He made a quick, nervous gesture toward one of the gold damask chairs, urging me to be seated. A second chair was pulled up, facing it, but he walked up and down in front of me, too restless to sit.
"I need your help," he said abruptly.
"Um?" I made a politely inquiring noise. Gonorrhea? I wondered, scanning him covertly. I hadn't heard of any women since Louise de La Tour, but then, it only took once. He worked his lips in and out, as though searching for some alternative to telling me, but finally gave it up.