“I may have smiled once or twice,” he said gravely. “But no.”
“Well, just you remember that,” she said, and with a swish of skirts, was off. He grinned like a fool and followed her.
When he reached the stairs, she was waiting, halfway down.
“One thing,” she said, lifting a finger at him.
“Aye?”
“If you find out who she’s sleeping with and don’t tell me, I will kill you.”
BALRIGGAN WAS A small place, little more than ten acres, plus the house and outbuildings. Still, it was bonnie, a large gray stone cottage tucked into the curve of a hill, a bittie wee loch glimmering like a looking glass at its foot. The English had burned the fields and the barn during the Rising, but fields came back. Much more easily than the men who tilled them.
He rode slowly past the loch, thinking that this visit was a mistake. It was possible to leave things behind—places, people, memories—at least for a time. But places held tight to the things that had happened in them, and to come again to a place you had once lived was to be brought face-to-face with what you had done there and who you had been.
Balriggan, though … it hadn’t been a bad place; he had loved the wee loch and the way it mirrored the sky, so still some mornings that you felt you might walk down into the clouds you saw reflected there, feeling their cold mist rise up about you, to wrap you in their drifting peace. Or in the summer evenings, when the surface glimmered in hundreds of overlapping rings as the hatch rose, the rhythm of it broken now and then by the sudden splash of a leaping salmon.
The road took him closer, and he saw the stony shallows where he’d shown wee Joan and Marsali how to guddle fish, all three of them so intent on their business they’d paid no heed to the midgies biting, and gone home wet to the waist and red with bites and sunburn, the wee maids skipping and swinging from his hands, gleeful in the sunset. He smiled just a little—then turned his horse’s head away, up the hill to the house.
The place was shabby but in decent repair, he grudgingly noted. There was a saddle mule browsing in the paddock behind the house, elderly but sound-looking. Well enough. Laoghaire wasn’t spending his money on follies or a coach-and-four, at least.
He set his hand on the gate and felt a twist go through his wame. The feel of the wood under his hand was eerily familiar; he’d lifted it without thinking, at the spot where it was always inclined to drag on the path. That twist corkscrewed its way up to his mouth as he recalled his last meeting with Ned Gowan, Laoghaire’s lawyer. “What does the bloody woman want, then?” he’d demanded, exasperated. To which Ned had replied cheerfully, “Your head, mounted above her gate.”
With a brief snort, he went through, closing the gate a bit harder than necessary, and glanced up at the house.
Movement took his eye. A man was sitting on the bench outside the cottage, staring at him over a bit of broken harness on his knee.
An ill-favored wee lad, Jamie thought, scrawny and narrow-faced as a ferret, with a walleye and a mouth that hung open as though in astonishment. Still, Jamie greeted the man pleasantly, asking was his mistress to home the day?
The lad—seen closer to, he must be in his thirties—blinked at him, then turned his head to bring his good eye to bear.
“Who’re you, then?” he asked, sounding unfriendly.
“Fraser of Broch Tuarach,” Jamie replied. It was a formal occasion, after all. “Is Mrs.—” He hesitated, not knowing how to refer to Laoghaire. His sister had said she persisted in calling herself “Mrs. Fraser,” despite the scandal. He hadn’t felt he could object—the fault of it being his and he being in America in any case—but damned if he’d call her that himself, even to her servant.
“Fetch your mistress, if ye please,” he said shortly.
“What d’ye want wi’ her?” The straight eye narrowed in suspicion.
He hadn’t expected obstruction and was inclined to reply sharply, but reined himself in. The man clearly kent something of him, and it was as well if Laoghaire’s servant was concerned for her welfare, even if the man’s manner was crude.
“I wish to speak with her, if ye’ve no great objection,” he said, with extreme politeness. “D’ye think ye might make shift to go and tell her so?”
The man made a rude sound in his throat but put aside the harness and stood up. Too late, Jamie saw that his spine was badly twisted and one leg shorter than the other. There was no way to apologize that would not make matters worse, though, and so he only nodded shortly and let the man lurch his way off into the house, thinking that it was just like Laoghaire to keep a lame servant for the express purpose of embarrassing him.
Then he shook himself in irritation, ashamed of his thought. What was it about him that a hapless woman such as Laoghaire MacKenzie should bring out every wicked, shameful trait he possessed? Not that his sister couldn’t do it, too, he reflected ruefully. But Jenny would evoke some bit of bad temper or hasty language from him, fan the flames ’til he was roaring, and then extinguish him neatly with a word, as though she’d doused him with cold water.
“Go see her,” Jenny had said.
“All right, then,” he said belligerently. “I’m here.”
“I see that,” said a light, dry voice. “Why?”
He swung round to face Laoghaire, who was standing in the doorway, broom in hand, giving him a cool look.
He snatched off his hat and bowed to her.
“Good day to ye. I hope I see ye well the day.” Apparently so; her face was slightly flushed beneath a starched white kerch, blue eyes clear.
She looked him over, expressionless save for fair brows arched high.
“I heard ye were come home. Why are ye here?”
“To see how ye fare.”
Her brows rose that wee bit higher.
“Well enough. What d’ye want?”
He’d gone through it in his mind a hundred times but should have known that for the waste of effort it was. There were things that could be planned for, but none of them involved women.
“I’ve come to say sorry to ye,” he said bluntly. “I said it before, and ye shot me. D’ye want to listen this time?”
The brows came down. She glanced from him to the broom in her hand, as though estimating its usefulness as a weapon, then looked back at him and shrugged.
“Suit yourself. Will ye come in, then?” She jerked her head toward the house.
“It’s a fine day. Shall we walk in the garden?” He had no wish to enter the house, with its memories of tears and silences.
She regarded him for a moment or two, then nodded and turned toward the garden path, leaving him to follow if he would. He noticed that she kept a grip on the broom, though, and was not sure whether to be amused or offended.
They walked in silence through the kailyard and through a gate into the garden. It was a kitchen garden, made for utility, but it had a small orchard at the end of it, and there were flowers growing between the pea vines and onion beds. She’d always liked flowers; he remembered that with a small twist of the heart.
She’d put the broom over her shoulder, like a soldier carrying a rifle, and strolled beside him—in no hurry but not offering him an opening, either. He cleared his throat.
“I said I’d come to apologize.”
“So ye did.” She didn’t turn to look at him but stopped and poked her toe at a curling potato vine.
“When we… wed,” he said, trying to retrieve the careful speech he’d thought of. “I should not have asked ye. My heart was cold. I’d no right to offer ye a dead thing.”
Her nostrils flared briefly, but she didn’t look up. Just went on frowning at the potato vine, as though she suspected it might have bugs.
“I knew that,” she said at last. “I did hope—” She broke off, lips pressing tight as she swallowed. “I did hope I might be of help to ye, though. Everyone could see ye needed a woman. Just not me, I suppose,” she added bitterly.
Stung, he said the first thing that came to his tongue.
“I thought ye needed me.”
She looked up then, her eyes gone bright. Christ, she was going to weep, he knew it. But she didn’t.
“I’d weans to feed.” Her voice was hard and flat and hit him like a slap on the cheek.
“So ye did,” he said, keeping his temper. It was honest, at least. “They’ve grown now, though.” And he’d found dowries for both Marsali and Joan, too, but he didn’t suppose he’d be given any credit for that.
“So that’s it,” she said, her voice growing colder. “Ye think ye can talk your way out of paying me now, is that it?”
“No, that is not it, for God’s sake!”
“Because,” she said, ignoring his denial and swinging round to face him, bright-eyed, “ye can’t. Ye shamed me before the whole parish, Jamie Fraser, luring me into a sinful match wi’ you and then betraying me, laughin’ at me behind your hand wi’ your Sassenach whore!”
“I didna—”
“And now ye come back from America, fardeled up like an English popinjay”—her lip curled in scorn at his good ruffled shirt, which he’d worn to show her respect, God damn it!—“flauntin’ your wealth and playin’ the great yin wi’ your ancient hussy foamin’ in her silks and satins on your arm, is it? Well, I’ll tell ye—” She swung the broom down from her shoulder and drove the handle of it violently into the ground. “Ye dinna understand one thing about me, and ye think ye can awe me into crawlin’ away like a dyin’ dog and troubling ye no more! Think again, that’s all I’ll say to ye—just think again!”
He snatched the purse out of his pocket and flung it at the door of the garden shed, where it struck with a boom and bounced off. He had just a moment to regret having brought a chunk of gold, and not coins that would jingle, before his temper flared.
“Aye, ye’re right about that, at least! I dinna understand one thing about ye! I never have, try as I might!”
“Oh, try as ye might, is it?” she cried, ignoring the purse. “Ye never tried for an instant, Jamie Fraser! In fact—” Her face clenched up like a fist as she fought to keep her voice under control. “Ye never truly looked at me. Never—well, no, I suppose ye looked once. When I was sixteen.” Her voice trembled on the word, and she looked away, jaw clamped tight. Then she looked back at him, eyes bright and tearless.
“Ye took a beating for me. At Leoch. D’ye recall that?”
For an instant, he didn’t. Then he stopped, breathing heavily. His hand went instinctively to his jaw, and against his will he felt the ghost of a smile rise against the anger.
“Oh. Aye. Aye, I do.” Angus Mhor had given him an easier time than he might have—but it was a fair beating, nonetheless. His ribs had ached for days.
She nodded, watching him. Her cheeks were splotched with red, but she’d calmed herself.
“I thought ye’d done it because ye loved me. I went on thinking that, ken, until well after we’d wed. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”