If ye were no longer there – or somewhere – ” he said very softly, “then the sun would no longer come up or go down.” He lifted my hand and kissed it, very gently. He laid it, closed around my ring, upon my chest, rose, and left.
I’ll thank ye,” said a cool, level voice, “to take your hands off my wife.
If,” I said through my teeth, “you ever raise a hand to me again, James Fraser, I’ll cut out your heart and fry it for breakfast!
Come to bed, a nighean. Nothing hurts when ye love me.” He was right; nothing did.
IN THE LIGHT OF eternity, time casts no shadow. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. But what is it that the old women see? We see necessity, and we do the things that must be done. Young women don’t see – they are, and the spring of life runs through them. Ours is the guarding of the spring, ours the shielding of the light we have lit, the flame that we are. What have I seen? You are the vision of my youth, the constant dream of all my ages.
I am a warrior, that my son may be a merchant – and his son may be a poet.
The greatest burden lies in caring for those we cannot help.
I have loved ye since I saw you, Sassenach,” he said very quietly, holding my eyes with his own, bloodshot and lined with tiredness but very blue. “I will love ye forever. It doesna matter if ye sleep with the whole English army – well, no,” he corrected himself, “it would matter, but it wouldna stop me loving you.
I said ‘Lord, if I’ve never had courage in my life before, let me have it now. Let me be brave enough not to fall on my knees and beg her to stay.
He was not afraid to die with her, by fire or any other way – only to live without her.
But even things that heal leave scars.
As yet too hungry and too clumsy for tenderness, still he made love with a sort of unflagging joy that made me think that male virginity might be a highly underrated commodity.
But what I do say is that there is nothing in this world or the next that can take ye from me – or me from you.
My marriage to Jamie had been for me like the turning of a great key, each small turn setting in the intricate fall of tumblers within me. Bree had been able to turn that key as well, edging closer to the unlocking of the door of myself. But the final turn of the lock was frozen – until I had walked into the print shop in Edinburgh, and the mechanism had sprung free with a final, decisive click.
Lord, he’d said. Let me be enough. That prayer had lodged in my heart like an arrow when I’d heard it and thought he asked for help in doing what had to be done. But that wasn’t what he’d meant at all – and the realization of what he had meant split my heart in two. I took his face between my hands, and wished so much that I had his own gift, the ability to say what lay in my heart, in such a way that he would know. But I hadn’t.
I loved Frank... I loved him alot. But by that time, Jamie was my heart and the breath of my body. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t.
Fiercely to cherish, softly to guard.
You may have it,” he said. His voice was very low, but he met my eyes straight on. “All of it. Anything that was ever done to me. If ye wish it, if it helps ye, I will live it through again.
I didna say I wanted an apology, did I? If I recall aright, what I said was ‘Bite me again.
Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed.” “That’s the first law of thermodynamics,” I said, wiping my nose. “No,” he said. “That’s faith.