“Will ye be needin’ anything else tonight, Mr. Wakefield?” Fiona’s voice roused him from his fruitless meditations. He sat up, blinking, to see her holding a broom and a polishing cloth.
“What? Er, no. No, thanks, Fiona. But what are you doing with all that clobber? Not still cleaning at this time of night?”
“Well, it’s the church ladies,” Fiona explained. “You remember, ye told them they could hold their regular monthly meeting here tomorrow? I thought I’d best tidy up a bit.”
The church ladies? Roger quailed at the thought of forty housewives, oozing sympathy, descending on the manse in an avalanche of tweeds, twin-sets, and cultured pearls.
“Will ye be takin’ tea with the ladies?” Fiona was asking. “The Reverend always did.”
The thought of entertaining Brianna Randall and the church ladies simultaneously was more than Roger could contemplate with equanimity.
“Er, no,” he said abruptly. “I’ve… I’ve an engagement tomorrow.”
His hand fell on the telephone, half-buried in the debris of the Reverend’s desk. “If you’ll excuse me, Fiona, I’ve got to make a call.”
Brianna wandered back into the bedroom, smiling to herself. I looked up from my book and arched a brow in inquiry.
“Phone call from Roger?” I said.
“How’d you know?” She looked startled for a moment, then grinned, shucking off her robe. “Oh, because he’s the only guy I know in Inverness?”
“I didn’t think any of your boyfriends would be calling long-distance from Boston,” I said. I peered at the clock on the table. “Not at this hour, anyway; they’ll all be at football practice.”
Brianna ignored this, and shoved her feet under the covers. “Roger’s invited us to go up to a place called St. Kilda tomorrow. He says it’s an interesting old church.”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, yawning. “All right, why not? I’ll take my plant press; maybe I can find some crown vetch – I promised some to Dr. Abernathy for his research. But if we’re going to spend the day tramping round reading old gravestones, I’m turning in now. Digging up the past is strenuous work.”
There was a brief flicker in Brianna’s face, and I thought she was about to say something. But she merely nodded, and reached to turn out the light, the secretive smile still lurking in the corners of her mouth.
I lay looking up into the darkness, hearing her small tossings and turnings fade into the regular cadences of her sleeping breath. St. Kilda, eh? I had never been there, but I knew of the place; it was an old church, as Brianna had said, long deserted and out of the way for tourists – only the occasional researcher ever went there. Perhaps this was the opportunity I had been waiting for, then?
I would have Roger and Brianna together there, and alone, with little fear of interruption. And perhaps it was a suitable place to tell them – there among the long-dead parishioners of St. Kilda. Roger had not yet verified the whereabouts of the rest of the Lallybroch men, but it seemed fairly sure that they had at least left Culloden Field alive, and that was really all I needed to know, now. I could tell Bree the end of it, then.
My mouth grew dry at the thought of the coming interview. Where was I to find the words for this? I tried to visualize how it might go; what I might say, and how they might react, but imagination failed me. More than ever, I regretted my promise to Frank that had kept me from writing to the Reverend Wakefield. If I had, Roger at least might already know. Or perhaps not; the Reverend might not have believed me.
I turned restlessly, seeking inspiration, but weariness crept over me. And at last I gave up and turned onto my back, closing my eyes on the dark above me. As though my thinking of him had summoned the Reverend’s spirit, a biblical quotation drifted into my fading consciousness: Sufficient unto the day, the Reverend’s voice seemed to murmur to me, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. And then I slept.
I woke up in the shadowed dark, hands clenched in the bedclothes, heart beating with a force that shook me like the skin of a kettledrum. “Jesus!” I said.
The silk of my nightgown was hot and clinging; looking down, I could dimly see my nipples thrusting through it, hard as marbles. The quivering spasms were still rippling through wrists and thighs, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. I hoped I hadn’t cried out. Probably not; I could hear Brianna’s breathing, untroubled and regular across the room.
I fell back on the pillow, shaking with weakness, the sudden flush washing my temples with damp.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I muttered, breathing deeply as my heart slowly returned to normal.
One of the effects of a disturbed sleep cycle is that one stops dreaming coherently. Through the long years of early motherhood, and then of internship, residency, and nights on-call, I had got used to falling at once into oblivion when I lay down, with such dreams as occurred nothing more than fragments and flashes, restless flickers in the dark as synapses fired at random, recharging themselves for the work of the day that would come too soon.
In more recent years, with the resumption of something resembling a normal schedule, I had begun to dream again. The usual kinds of dreams, whether nightmare or good dream – long sequences of images, wanderings in the wood of the mind. And I was familiar with this kind of dream, too; it was common to what might politely be called periods of deprivation.
Usually, though, such dreams came floating, soft as the touch of satin sheets, and if they woke me, I fell at once back into sleep, glowing dimly with a memory that would not last ’til morning.
This was different. Not that I remembered much about it, but I had a vague impression of hands that gripped me, rough and urgent, not wooing but compelling. And a voice, nearly shouting, that echoed in the chambers of my inner ear, along with the sound of my fading heartbeat.
I put my hand on my chest over the leaping pulse, feeling the soft fullness of my breast beneath the silk. Brianna’s breath caught in a soft snore, then resumed its even cadence. I remembered listening for that sound when she was small; the slow, stertorous rhythm of reassurance, sounding through the darkened nursery, even as a heartbeat.
My own heartbeat was slowing under my hand, under the deep rose silk, the color of a baby’s sleep-flushed cheek. When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.
Babies are soft. Anyone looking at them can see the tender, fragile skin and know it for the rose-leaf softness that invites a finger’s touch. But when you live with them and love them, you feel the softness going inward, the round-checked flesh wobbly as custard, the boneless splay of the tiny hands. Their joints are melted rubber, and even when you kiss them hard, in the passion of loving their existence, your lips sink down and seem never to find bone. Holding them against you, they melt and mold, as though they might at any moment flow back into your body.
But from the very start, there is that small streak of steel within each child. That thing that says “I am,” and forms the core of personality.
In the second year, the bone hardens and the child stands upright, skull wide and solid, a helmet protecting the softness within. And “I am” grows, too. Looking at them, you can almost see it, sturdy as heartwood, glowing through the translucent flesh.
The bones of the face emerge at six, and the soul within is fixed at seven. The process of encapsulation goes on, to reach its peak in the glossy shell of adolescence, when all softness then is hidden under the nacreous layers of the multiple new personalities that teenagers try on to guard themselves.