23 RETURN TO LEOCH.
Her breath was warm on his cheek, smelling of fried egg.
St Paul says “Let a woman be silent, and –”’ ‘You can mind your own bloody business,’ I snarled, sweat dripping behind my ears, ’and so can St Paul.
He stripped off his stockings to dry and laid them on the rock to lie in the sun. His long bare toes wiggled in enjoyment of the warmth.
I swear by the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by the holy iron that I hold, to give ye my fealty and pledge ye my loyalty to the name of the clan MacKenzie. If ever my hand shall be raised against ye in rebellion, I ask that this holy iron shall pierce my heart.
Rosemary bushes.
You have free choice; so have all the others in this world. And history, I believe, is a cumulation of all those actions. Some individuals are chosen by God to affect the destinies of many. Perhaps you are one of those. Perhaps not. I do not know why you are here. You do not know. It is likely that neither of us will ever know. Sometimes I don’t even know why I am here! – Father Anselm.
The grin visible beneath the crook of his arm widened still further. “Sassenach?” I stopped, dirk still in my hand. “What?” “I’ll die a happy man.
My body is out from my control,” he said softly. “She was the half of my body – the very half of my soul.
Ye dinna stop loving someone just because they’re deid,” she said reprovingly. “I canna suppose they stop lovin’ you, either.
You know these things. – And yet, somehow, you never think it will be today.
Meals were the daily bane of my existence; not so much the constant work of picking, cleaning, chopping, cooking – though those activities were fairly baneful in themselves – but primarily the never-ending chore of remembering what we had on hand, and balancing the effort required to make it edible against the knowledge of what might spoil if we didn’t eat it right away.
No man owns his own life,” he said. “Part of you is always in someone else’s hands. All ye can do is hope it’s mostly God’s hands you’re in.
The body forms internal scars as well as surface scars when a wound heals – and so does the mind.
But each one of us is called to live our lives in the smaller moments; to do kindness, to risk our feelings, to take a chance on someone else, to meet the needs of the people we care for. Because God is everywhere, and lives in all of us. Those small moments are His.
Forgiveness doesna make things go away.
But war’s war, Sassenach. Honor only makes it a bit easier to live wi’ yourself, afterward.
When ye ha’ bairns, there’s that wee time when ye really are all they need. And then they leave your arms and ye’re scairt all over again, because now ye ken all the things that could harm them, and you not able to keep them from it.
If he were to find rest tonight, they would have to be exhumed; the ghosts raised in order to lay them.
As with all redheads, the color of her hair depended on the light in which one saw her: brown in shadow, blazing in sunlight, and by the light of a low-burning fire, a fall of changing color, sparked with threads of gold.
Of course, had she gone, he would have died, he reflected. And never come to this place and got his land, nor seen his daughter, nor held his grandson in his arms. Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn’t always a misfortune – so long as you didn’t actually die of it.