"No," I answered softly. "He has a lot on his mind."
"Well he might," she said, glancing at the bed behind me. Ian was gone already, risen at dawn to see to the stock in the barn. The horses that could be spared from the farming—and some that couldn't—needed shoeing, needed harness, in preparation for their journey to rebellion.
"You can talk to a babe, ye ken," she said suddenly, breaking into my thought. "Really talk, I mean. Ye can tell them anything, no matter how foolish it would sound did ye say it to a soul could understand ye."
"Oh. You heard him, then?" I asked. She nodded, eyes on the curve of Katherine's cheek, where the tiny dark lashes lay against the fair skin, eyes closed in ecstasy.
"Aye. Ye shouldna worrit yourself," she added, smiling gently at me. "It isna that he feels he canna talk to you; he knows he can. But it's different to talk to a babe that way. It's a person; ye ken that you're not alone. But they dinna ken your words, and ye don't worry a bit what they'll think of ye, or what they may feel they must do. You can pour out your heart to them wi'out choosing your words, or keeping anything back at all—and that's a comfort to the soul."
She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were something that everyone knew. I wondered whether she spoke that way often to her child. The generous wide mouth, so like her brother's, lifted slightly at one side.
"It's the way ye talk to them before they're born," she said softly. "You'll know?"
I placed my hands gently over my belly, one atop the other, remembering.
"Yes, I know."
She pressed a thumb against the baby's cheek, breaking the suction, and with a deft movement, shifted the small body to bring the full breast within reach.
"I've thought that perhaps that's why women are so often sad, once the child's born," she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. "Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they're born, and they're different—not the way ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o' course, and get to know them the way they are…but still, there's the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it's the grievin' for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms." She dipped her head and kissed her daughter's downy skull.
"Yes," I said. "Before…it's all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it's born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is."
She rocked gently back and forth, and the small clutching hand that seized the folds of green silk over her breast began to loose its grip.
"And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead," she said quietly. "And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn't know, that's gone for good, until you know the child you have, and then at last it's as though they could never have been other than they are, and ye feel naught but joy in them. But 'til then, ye weep easy."
"And men…" I said, thinking of Jamie, whispering secrets to the unhearing ears of the child.
"Aye. They hold their bairns, and they feel all the things that might be, and the things that will never be. But it isna so easy for a man to weep for the things he doesna ken."
PART SIX
The Flames of Rebellion
36
PRESTONPANS
Scotland, September 1745
Four days' march found us on the crest of a hill near Calder. A sizable moor stretched out at the foot of the hill, but we set up camp within the shelter of the trees above. There were two small streams cutting through the moss-covered rock of the hillside, and the crisp weather of early fall made it seem much more like picnicking than a march to war.
But it was the seventeenth of September, and if my sketchy knowledge of Jacobite history was correct, war it would be, in a matter of days.
"Tell it to me again, Sassenach," Jamie had said, for the dozenth time, as we made our way along the winding trails and dirt roads. I rode Donas, while Jamie walked alongside, but now slid down to walk beside him, to make conversation easier. While Donas and I had reached an understanding of sorts, he was the kind of horse that demanded your full concentration to ride; he was all too fond of scraping an unwary rider off by walking under low branches, for example.
"I told you before, I don't know that much," I said. "There was very little written about it in the history books, and I didn't pay a great deal of attention at the time. All I can tell you is that the battle was fought—er, will be fought—near the town of Preston, and so it's called the Battle of Prestonpans, though the Scots called—call—it the Battle of Gladsmuir, because of an old prophecy that the returning king will be victorious at Gladsmuir. Heaven knows where the real Gladsmuir is, if there is one."
"Aye. And?"
I furrowed my brow, trying to recall every last scrap of information. I could conjure a mental picture of the small, tattered brown copy of A Child's History of England, read by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern in a mud hut somewhere in Persia. Mentally flicking the pages, I could just recall the two-page section that was all the author had seen fit to devote to the second Jacobite Rising, known to historians as "the '45." And within that two-page section, the single paragraph dealing with the battle we were about to fight.
"The Scots win," I said helpfully.
"Well, that's the important point," he agreed, a bit sarcastically, "but it would be a bit of help to know a little more."
"If you wanted prophecy, you should have gotten a seer," I snapped, then relented. "I'm sorry. It's only that I don't know much, and it's very frustrating."
"Aye, it is." He reached down and took my hand, squeezing it as he smiled at me. "Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. Ye canna say more than ye know, but tell me it all, just once more."
"All right." I squeezed back, and we walked on, hand in hand. "It was a remarkable victory," I began, reading from my mental page, "because the Jacobites were so greatly outnumbered. They surprised General Cope's army at dawn—they charged out of the rising sun, I remember that—and it was a rout. There were hundreds of casualties on the English side, and only a few from the Jacobite side—thirty men, that was it. Only thirty men killed."
Jamie glanced behind us, at the straggling tail of the Lallybroch men, strung out as they walked along the road, chatting and singing in small groups. Thirty men was what we had brought from Lallybroch. It didn't seem that small a number, looking at them. But I had seen the battlefields of Alsace-Lorraine, and the acres of meadowland converted to muddy boneyards by the burial of the thousands slain.
"Taken all in all," I said, feeling faintly apologetic, "I'm afraid it was really rather…unimportant, historically speaking."
Jamie blew out his breath through pursed lips, and looked down at me rather bleakly.
"Unimportant. Aye, well."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Not your fault, Sassenach."
But I couldn't help feeling that it was, somehow.
The men sat around the fire after their supper, lazily enjoying the feeling of full stomachs, exchanging stories and scratching. The scratching was endemic; close quarters and lack of hygiene made body lice so common as to excite no remark when one man detached a representative specimen from a fold of his plaid and tossed it into the fire. The louse flamed for an instant, one among the sparks of the fire, and then was gone.
The young man they called Kincaid—his name was Alexander, but there were so many Alexanders that most of them ended up being called by nicknames or middle names—seemed particularly afflicted with the scourge this evening. He dug viciously under one arm, into his curly brown hair, then—with a quick glance to see whether I was looking in his direction—at his crotch.
"Got 'em bad, have ye, lad?" Ross the smith observed sympathetically.
"Aye," he answered, "the wee buggers are eatin' me alive."
"Bloody hell to get out of your c**k hairs," Wallace Fraser observed, scratching himself in sympathy. "Gives me the yeuk to watch ye, laddie."
"D'ye ken the best way to rid yourself o' the wee beasties?" Sorley McClure asked helpfully, and at Kincaid's negative shake of the head, leaned forward and carefully pulled a flaming stick from the fire.
"Lift your kilt a moment, laddie, and I'll smoke 'em out for ye," he offered, to catcalls and jeers of laughter from the men.
"Bloody farmer," Murtagh grumbled. "And what would ye know about it?"
"You know a better way?" Wallace raised thick brows skeptically, wrinkling the tanned skin of his balding forehead.
"O' course." He drew his dirk with a flourish. "The laddie's a soldier now; let him do it like a soldier does."
Kincaid's open face was guileless and eager. "How's that?"
"Weel, verra simple. Ye take your dirk, lift your plaidie, and shave off half the hairs on your crutch." He raised the dirk warningly. "Only half, mind."
"Half? Aye, well…" Kincaid looked doubtful, but was paying close attention. I could see the grins of anticipation broadening on the faces of the men around the fire, but no one was laughing yet.