They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.
Damn ye, woman! Will ye never do as you’re told?” “Probably not,” I said meekly.
My life is yours. And it’s yours to decide what we shall do, where we go next. To France, to Italy, even back to Scotland. My heart has been yours since the first time I saw ye, and you’ve held my soul and body between your hands here and kept them safe. We shall go as ye say.
Who needed the relief of occasional bad language more than a mother of small children? Maybe.
He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh.
I could know ye all my life, I think, and always love you.
If your head thinks up mischief, your backside’s going to pay for it.
Ye must always give money for a new blade,” he explained, half smiling. “So it kens ye for its owner, and willna turn on ye.
His mouth tightened up and he says, ‘I thought this was the young man who only a week past was shouting that he wasn’t afraid to die. Surely a man who’s not afraid to die isn’t afraid of a few lashes?’ and he gives Jamie a poke in the belly wi’ the handle of the whip. “Jamie met Randall’s eye straight on then, and said, ‘No, but I’m afraid I’ll freeze stiff before ye’re done talking.
He said the truth is the truth, and people should take responsibility for their own actions, which is right.
I’m none so brave as I was before, ken?” he said very softly. “Not brave enough to live without ye anymore.
Idleness would have seemed not only a sign of moral decay, but an affront to the natural order of things.
Ye ken how to pick a good lass, MacKenzie? Start at the bottom and work your way up!
If you find him,” she whispered, “when you find my father – give him this.” She bent and kissed me, fiercely, gently, then straightened and turned me toward the stone. “Go, Mama,” she said, breathless. “I love you. Go!
Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second. It’s what happens when you live through things you shouldn’t have been able to live through and can’t reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.
Faith is as powerful a force as science,” he concluded, voice soft in the darkness, “but far more dangerous.
The thing was, some men needed killing. The Church didn’t admit that, save it was war. The Mohawk understood it fine. So did Uncle Jamie.
How to tell her in words, then, what he had learned himself by pain and grace? That only by forgiveness could she forget – and that forgiveness was not a single act, but a matter of constant practice.
He had changed, of course, but the change was subtle; as though he had been put into an oven and baked to a hard finish. He looked as though both muscle and skin had drawn in just a bit, grown closer to the bone, so he was more tightly knit; he had never seemed gawky, but the last hint of boyish looseness had vanished.
Had it really happened, that memory? Or was it only his desire that now and then brought her so vividly to life, in snatched moments that left him desperate with longing but strangely comforted, as though she had in fact touched him briefly?