Let’s go.” Jamie’s hand was firm on my arm, and I made no protest. Following Jared, guarded by the sailors, we stole away from the quay, surreptitious as though we had started the fire.
And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed.
There was news to hear and to ask about – of English patrols in the district, of politics, of arrests and trials in London and Edinburgh. That he could wait for. Better to talk to Ian about the estate, to Jenny about the children. If it seemed safe, the children would be brought down to say hello to their uncle, to give him sleepy hugs and damp kisses before stumbling back to their beds.
Damn! Blazing Hades! That filth-eating son of a pig-fart!
My hens?” he said, outrage bringing the blood to his face.
One leg was stained with blood down to the ankle, and he walked with a ginger, spraddled gait, but he would on no account let a “wumman” lay hands on him to see what was the matter.
The moon was beginning to rise when they set out, and a good thing, too, Brianna thought. Even with the big, lopsided gold orb sailing up out of a cradle of stars and shedding its borrowed radiance over the sky, the trail beneath their feet was invisible. So were their feet, drowned in the absolute black of the forest at night.
Once there, he took a moment to knead the bedclothes with his paws and turn three times widdershins, as though taking the curse off his resting place, before lying down at my feet, resting his nose on his paws with a deep sigh.
Call it fate,” Claire had said, looking at him with a hawk’s eye, the one that sees from far above, so far above, maybe, that what seems mercilessness is truly compassion. “Or call it bad luck. But it wasn’t your fault. Or hers.
It’s true!” She whirled toward Jamie, fists clenched against the cloak she still wore. “It’s true! It’s the Sassenach witch! How could ye do such a thing to me, Jamie Fraser?
That is what God is for. Worry doesna help – prayer does. Sometimes,’ he added honestly.
For there’s a part of me would like no better than to take you and the bairn and go far away, to spend the rest of my life working the fields and the beasts, to come in in the evenings and lie beside ye, quiet through the night.
Young and inexperienced Grey might be, but he was not unobservant. Neither was he a poor judge of men.
To my surprise, it was Lord John. But a Lord John I had never seen before. He was not so much disheveled as shattered, everything in order save his face. “What?” I said, deeply alarmed. “What’s happened?
He put a hand flat on the counter, as though to steady himself. “I have – bad news.” “I can see that,” I said, a little tartly. “Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down.” He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and looked at me. His face was ghastly, shocked and white, and the rims of his eyes showed red.
But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.
James Fraser,” he said. His eyes were fixed on William with a burning intensity, as though to absorb every vestige of a sight he would not see again. “Ye kent me once as Alex MacKenzie. At Helwater.
I had turned the earth in my garden the day before, planting the winter seeds to sleep and swell, to dream their buried birth. Now is the time when we reenter the womb of the world, dreaming the dreams of snow and silence.
Stop it! It’s too big! Take it out!
No matter how much one knows that something dreadful is going to happen in the future, one somehow never thinks it will be today.