“To what, Sassenach?” He had stopped washing and was watching me intently, head on one side.
“To…to…” To my annoyance, I was flushing as deeply as he was, but without the excuse of hot water.
A large hand rose dripping out of the water and rested on my arm. The wet heat burned through the thin fabric of my sleeve.
“Sassenach,” he said, “what do ye think I’ve been doing?”
“Er, well,” I said, trying and failing to keep my eyes away from the marks on his thigh. He laughed, though he didn’t sound truly amused.
“O ye of little faith!” he said sardonically.
I withdrew beyond his reach.
“Well,” I said, “when one’s husband comes home covered with bites and scratches and reeking with perfume, admits he’s spent the night in a bawdy house, and…”
“And tells ye flat-out he’s spent the night watching, not doing?”
“You didn’t get those marks on your leg from watching!” I snapped suddenly, then clamped my lips together. I felt like a jealous biddy, and I didn’t care for it. I had vowed to take it all calmly, like a woman of the world, telling myself that I had complete faith in Jamie and—just in case—that you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs. Even if something had happened…
I smoothed the wet spot on my sleeve, feeling the air chill through the cooling silk. I struggled to regain my former light tone.
“Or are those the scars of honorable combat, gained in defending your virtue?” Somehow the light tone didn’t quite come off. Listening to myself, I had to admit that the overall tone was really quite nasty. I was rapidly ceasing to care.
No slouch at reading tones of voice, Jamie narrowed his eyes at me and seemed about to reply. He drew in his breath, then apparently thought better of whatever he had been going to say and let it out again.
“Yes,” he said calmly. He fished about in the tub between his legs, coming up at length with the cake of soap, a roughly shaped ball of white slickness. He held it out on his palm.
“Will ye help me to wash my hair? His Highness vomited on me in the coach coming home, and I reek a bit, all things considered.”
I hesitated a moment, but accepted the olive branch, temporarily at least.
I could feel the solid curve of his skull under the thick, soapy hair, and the welt of the healed scar across the back of his head. I dug my thumbs firmly into his neck muscles, and he relaxed slightly under my hands.
The soap bubbles ran down across the wet, gleaming curves of his shoulders, and my hands followed them, spreading the slickness so that my fingers seemed to float on the surface of his skin.
He was big, I thought. Near him so much, I tended to forget his size, until I saw him suddenly from a distance, towering among smaller men, and I would be struck anew by his grace and the beauty of his body. But he sat now with his knees nearly underneath his chin, and his shoulders filled the tub from one side to the other. He leaned forward slightly to assist my ministrations, exposing the hideous scars on his back. The thick red welts of Jack Randall’s Christmas gift lay heavily over the thin white lines of the earlier floggings.
I touched the scars gently, my heart squeezed by the sight. I had seen those wounds when they were fresh, seen him driven to the edge of madness by torture and abuse. But I had healed him, and he had fought with all the power of a gallant heart to be whole once more, to come back to me. Moved by tenderness, I brushed the trailing ends of his hair aside, and bent to kiss the back of his neck.
I straightened abruptly. He felt my movement and turned his head slightly.
“What is it, Sassenach?” he asked, voice slow with drowsy contentment.
“Not a thing,” I said, staring at the dark-red blotches on the side of his neck. The nurses in the quarters at Pembroke used to conceal them with jaunty scarves tied about their necks the morning after their dates with soldiers from the nearby base. I always thought the scarves were really meant as a means of advertisement, rather than concealment.
“No, not a thing,” I said again, reaching for the ewer on the stand. Placed near the window, it was ice-cold to the touch. I stepped behind Jamie and upended it on his head.
I lifted the silk skirts of my nightdress to avoid the sudden wave that spilled over the side of the bath. He was sputtering from the cold, but too shocked yet to form any of the words I could see gathering force on his lips. I beat him to it.
“Just watched, did you?” I asked coldly. “I wouldn’t suppose you enjoyed it a bit, did you, poor thing?”
He thrust himself back in the tub with a violence that made the water slosh over the sides, splattering on the stone floor, and twisted around to look up at me.
“What d’ye want me to say?” he demanded. “Did I want to rut with them? Aye, I did! Enough to make my balls ache with not doing it. And enough to make me feel sick wi’ the thought of touching one of the sluts.”
He shoved the sopping mass of his hair out of his eyes, glaring at me.
“Is that what ye wanted to know? Are ye satisfied now?”
“Not really,” I said. My face was hot, and I pressed my cheek against the icy pane of the window, hands clenched on the sill.
“Who looks on a woman with lust in his heart hath committed adultery with her already. Is that how ye see it?”
“Is it how you see it?”
“No,” he said shortly. “I don’t. And what would ye do if I had lain wi’ a whore, Sassenach? Slap my face? Order me out of your chamber? Keep yourself from my bed?”
I turned and looked at him.
“I’d kill you,” I said through my teeth.
Both eyebrows shot up, and his mouth dropped slightly with incredulity.
“Kill me? God, if I found you wi’ another man, I’d kill him.” He paused, and one corner of his mouth quirked wryly.
“Mind ye,” he said, “I’d no be verra pleased wi’ you, either, but still, it’s him I’d kill.”
“Typical man,” I said. “Always missing the point.”
He snorted with a bitter humor.
“Am I, then? So you dinna believe me. Want me to prove it to ye, Sassenach, that I’ve lain wi’ no one in the last few hours?” He stood up, water cascading down the stretches of his long legs. The light from the window highlighted the reddish-gold hairs of his body and the steam rose off his flesh in wisps. He looked like a figure of freshly molten gold. I glanced briefly down.
“Ha,” I said, with the maximum of scorn it was possible to infuse into one syllable.
“Hot water,” he said briefly, stepping out of the tub. “Dinna worry yourself, it won’t take long.”
“That,” I said, with delicate precision, “is what you think.”
His face flushed still more deeply, and his hands curled involuntarily into fists.
“No reasoning wi’ you, is there?” he demanded. “God, I spend the night torn between disgust and agony, bein’ tormented by my companions for being unmanly, then come home to be tormented for being unchaste! Mallaichte bàs!”
Looking wildly about, he spotted his discarded clothing on the floor near the bed and lunged for it.
“Here, then!” he said, scrabbling for his belt. “Here! If lusting is adultery and you’ll kill me for adultery, then ye’d best do it, hadn’t ye!” He came up with his dirk, a ten-inch piece of dark steel, and thrust it at me, haft first. He squared his shoulders, presenting the broad expanse of his chest to me, and glared belligerently.
“Go ahead,” he insisted. “Ye dinna mean to be forsworn, I hope? Being so sensitive to your honor as a wife and all?”
It was a real temptation. My clenched hands quivered at my sides with the longing to take the dagger and plant it firmly between his ribs. Only the knowledge that, all his dramatizing aside, he certainly wouldn’t allow me to stab him, stopped me from trying. I felt sufficiently ridiculous, without humiliating myself further. I whirled away from him in a flurry of silk.
After a moment, I heard the clank of
the dirk on the floorboards. I stood without moving, staring out of the window at the back courtyard below. I heard faint rustling sounds behind me, and glanced into the faint reflections of the window. My face showed in the windowpane as a smudged oval in a nimbus of sleep-snarled brown hair. Jamie’s naked figure moved dimly in the glass like someone seen underwater, searching for a towel.
“The towel is on the bottom shelf of the ewer-stand,” I said, turning around.
“Thank you.” He dropped the dirty shirt with which he had begun gingerly dabbing himself and reached for the towel, not looking at me.
He wiped his face, then seemed to make some decision. He lowered the towel and looked directly at me. I could see the emotions struggling for mastery on his face, and felt as though I were still looking into the mirror of the window. Sense triumphed in both of us at once.
“I’m sorry,” we said, in unison. And laughed.
The damp of his skin soaked through the thin silk, but I didn’t care.
Minutes later, he mumbled something into my hair.
“What?”
“Too close,” he repeated, moving back a bit. “It was too damn close, Sassenach, and it scared me.”
I glanced down at the dirk, lying forgotten on the floor.
“Scared? I’ve never seen anyone less scared in my life. You knew damned well I wouldn’t do it.”
“Oh, that.” He grinned. “No, I didna think you’d kill me, much as ye might like to.” He sobered quickly. “No, it was…well, those women. What I felt like with them. I didna want them, truly not…”
“Yes, I know,” I said, reaching for him, but he wasn’t stopping there. He held back from me, looking troubled.
“But the…the lusting, I suppose ye’d call it…that was…too close to what I feel sometimes for you, and it…well, it doesna seem right to me.”
He turned away, rubbing at his hair with the linen towel, so his voice came half-muffled.
“I always thought it would be a simple matter to lie wi’ a woman,” he said softly. “And yet…I want to fall on my face at your feet and worship you”—he dropped the towel and reached out, taking me by the shoulders—“and still I want to force ye to your knees before me, and hold ye there wi’ my hands tangled in your hair, and your mouth at my service…and I want both things at the same time, Sassenach.” He ran his hands up under my hair and gripped my face between them, hard.
“I dinna understand myself at all, Sassenach! Or maybe I do.” He released me and turned away. His face had long since dried, but he picked up the fallen towel and wiped the skin of his jaw with it, over and over. The stubble made a faint rasping sound against the fine linen. His voice was still quiet, barely audible from a few feet away.
“Such things—the knowledge of them, I mean—it came to me soon after…after Wentworth.” Wentworth. Where he had given his soul to save my life, and suffered the tortures of the damned in retrieving it.
“I thought at the first that Jack Randall had stolen a bit of my soul, and then I knew it was worse than that. All of it was my own, and had been all along; it was only he’d shown it to me, and made me know it for myself. That’s what he did that I canna forgive, and may his own soul rot for it!”
He lowered the towel and looked at me, face worn with the strains of the night, but eyes bright with urgency.
“Claire. To feel the small bones of your neck beneath my hands, and that fine, thin skin on your breasts and your arms…Lord, you are my wife, whom I cherish and I love wi’ all my life, and still I want to kiss ye hard enough to bruise your tender lips, and see the marks of my fingers on your skin.”
He dropped the towel. He raised his hands and held them trembling in the air before his face, then very slowly brought them down to rest on my head as though in benediction.
“I want to hold you like a kitten in my shirt, mo duinne, and still I want to spread your thighs and plow ye like a rutting bull.” His fingers tightened in my hair. “I dinna understand myself!”
I pulled my head back, freeing myself, and took a half-step backward. The blood seemed all to be on the surface of my skin, and a chill ran down my body at the brief separation.
“Do you think it’s different for me? Do you think I don’t feel the same?” I demanded. “That I don’t sometimes want to bite you hard enough to taste blood, or claw you ’til you cry out?”
I reached out slowly to touch him. The skin of his breast was damp and warm. Only the nail of my forefinger touched him, just below the nipple. Lightly, barely touching, I drew the nail upward, downward, circling round, watching the tiny nub rise hard amid the curling ruddy hairs.
The nail pressed slightly harder, sliding down, leaving a faint red streak on the fair skin of his chest. I was trembling all over by this time, but did not turn away.
“Sometimes I want to ride you like a wild horse, and bring you to the taming—did you know that? I can do it, you know I can. Drag you over the edge and drain you to a gasping husk. I can drive you to the edge of collapse and sometimes I delight in it, Jamie, I do! And yet so often I want”—my voice broke suddenly and I had to swallow hard before continuing—“I want…to hold your head against my breast and cradle you like a child and comfort you to sleep.”
My eyes were so full of tears that I couldn’t see his face clearly; couldn’t see if he wept as well. His arms went tight around me and the damp heat of him engulfed me like the breath of a monsoon.
“Claire, ye do kill me, knife or no,” he whispered, face buried in my hair. He bent and picked me up, carrying me to the bed. He sank to his knees, laying me amid the rumpled quilts.
“You’ll lie wi’ me now,” he said quietly. “And I shall use ye as I must. And if you’ll have your revenge for it, then take it and welcome, for my soul is yours, in all the black corners of it.”
The skin of his shoulders was warm with the heat of the bath, but he shivered as with cold as my hands traveled up to his neck, and I pulled him down to me.
And when I had at length taken my last revenge of him, I did cradle him, stroking back the roughened, half-dry locks.
“And sometimes,” I whispered to him, “I wish it could be you inside me. That I could take you into me and keep you safe always.”
His hand, large and warm, lifted slowly from the bed and cupped the small round swell of my belly, sheltering and caressing.
“You do, my own,” he said. “You do.”
* * *
I felt it for the first time while lying in bed the next morning, watching Jamie dress for the day. A tiny fluttering sensation, at once entirely familiar and completely new. Jamie had his back turned to me, as he wriggled into his knee-length shirt and stretched his arms, settling the folds of white linen across the breadth of his shoulders.
I lay quite still, waiting, hoping for it to come again. It did, this time as a series of infinitesimal quick movements, like the bursting of bubbles rising to the surface of a carbonated liquid.
I had a sudden memory of Coca-Cola; that odd, dark, fizzy American drink. I had tasted it once, while having supper with an American colonel, who served it as a delicacy—which it was, in wartime. It came in thick greenish bottles, smooth-ribbed and tapered, with a high-waisted nip to the glass, so that the bottle was roughly woman-shaped, with a rounded bulge just below the neck, swelling to a broader one farther down.
I remembered how the millions of tiny bubbles had rushed into the narrow neck when the bottle was opened, smaller and finer than the bubbles of champagne, bursting joyous in the air. I laid one hand very gently on my abdomen, just above the womb.
There it was. There was no sense of him, or her, as I had thought there might be—but there was certainly a sense of Someone. I wondered whether perhaps babies had no gender—physical characteristics aside—until birth, when the act of exposure to the outside world set them forever as one or the other.
“Jamie,” I said. He was tying back his hair, gathering it into a thick handful at the base of his neck and winding a
leather lace about it. Head bent in the task, he looked up at me from under his brows and smiled.
“Awake, are ye? It’s early yet, mo duinne. Go back to sleep for a bit.”
I had been going to tell him, but something stopped me. He couldn’t feel it, of course, not yet. It wasn’t that I thought he wouldn’t care, but there was something about that first awareness that seemed suddenly private; the second shared secret between me and the child—the first being our knowledge of its existence, mine a conscious knowing, the embryo’s a simple being. The sharing of that knowledge linked us close as did the blood that passed through both of us.
“Do you want me to braid your hair for you?” I asked. When he went to the docks, sometimes he would ask me to plait his ruddy mane in a tight queue, proof against the tugging winds on deck and quay. He always teased that he would have it dipped in tar, as the sailors did, to solve the problem permanently.
He shook his head, and reached for his kilt.
“No, I’m going to call on His Highness Prince Charles today. And drafty as his house is, I think it wilna be blowing my hair in my eyes.” He smiled at me, coming to stand by the bed. He saw my hand lying on my stomach, and put his own lightly over it.