In memory, I saw Graham Menzies’s other hand rise from his side, trailing tubes, and close over my own. He hadn’t much strength, then, but enough.
“I sat there until he was gone, holding his hand.” I felt it still, the steady beat of the wrist-pulse under my thumb, growing slower, and slower still, as I held his hand, and then waiting for a beat that did not come.
I looked up at Jamie, shaking off the memory.
“And then a nurse came in.” It had been one of the younger nurses—an excitable girl, with no discretion. She wasn’t very experienced, but knew enough to tell a dead man when she saw one. And me just sitting there, doing nothing—most undoctorlike conduct. And the empty morphia syringe, lying on the table beside me.
“She talked, of course,” I said.
“I expect she would.”
“I had the presence of mind to drop the syringe into the incinerator chute after she left, though. It was her word against mine, and the whole matter was just dismissed.”
My mouth twisted wryly. “Except that the next week, they offered me a job as head of the whole department. Very important. A lovely office on the sixth floor of the hospital—safely away from the patients, where I couldn’t murder anyone else.”
My finger was still rubbing absently across my wrist. Jamie reached out and stopped it by laying his own hand over mine.
“When was this, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice very gentle.
“Just before I took Bree and went to Scotland. That’s why I went, in fact; they gave me an extended leave—said I’d been working too hard, and deserved a nice vacation.” I didn’t try to keep the irony out of my voice.
“I see.” His hand was warm on mine, despite the heat of my fever. “If it hadna been for that, for losing your work—would ye have come, Sassenach? Not just to Scotland. To me?”
I looked up at him and squeezed his hand, taking a deep breath.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t. If I hadn’t come to Scotland, met Roger Wakefield, found out that you—” I stopped and swallowed, overwhelmed. “It was Graham who sent me to Scotland,” I said at last, feeling slightly choked. “He asked me to go someday—and say hello to Aberdeen for him.” I glanced up at Jamie suddenly.
“I didn’t! I never did go to Aberdeen.”
“Dinna trouble yourself, Sassenach.” Jamie squeezed my hand. “I’ll take ye there myself—when we go back. Not,” he added practically, “that there’s anything to see there.”
It was growing stuffy in the cabin. He rose and went to open one of the stern windows.
“Jamie,” I said, watching his back, “what do you want?”
He glanced around, frowning slightly in thought.
“Oh—an orange would be good,” he said. “There’s some in the desk, aye?” Without waiting for a reply, he rolled back the lid of the desk, revealing a small bowl of oranges, bright among the litter of quills and papers. “D’ye want one, too?”
“All right,” I said, smiling. “That wasn’t really what I meant, though. I meant—what do you want to do, once we’ve found Ian?”
“Oh.” He sat down by the berth, an orange in his hands, and stared at it for a moment.
“D’ye know,” he said at last, “I dinna think anyone has ever asked me that—what it was I wanted to do.” He sounded mildly surprised.
“Not as though you very often had a choice about it, is it?” I said dryly. “Now you do, though.”
“Aye, that’s true.” He rolled the orange between his palms, head bent over the dimpled sphere. “I suppose it’s come to ye that we likely canna go back to Scotland—at least for a time?” he said. I had told him of Tompkins’s revelations about Sir Percival and his machinations, of course, but we had had little time to discuss the matter—or its implications.
“It has,” I said. “That’s why I asked.”
I was quiet then, letting him come to terms with it. He had lived as an outlaw for a good many years, hiding first physically, and then by means of secrecy and aliases, eluding the law by slipping from one identity to another. But now all these were known; there was no way for him to resume any of his former activities—or even to appear in public in Scotland.
His final refuge had always been Lallybroch. But even that avenue of retreat was lost to him now. Lallybroch would always be his home, but it was no longer his; there was a new laird now. I knew he would not begrudge the fact that Jenny’s family possessed the estate—but he must, if he were human, regret the loss of his heritage.
I could hear his faint snort, and thought he had probably reached the same point in his thinking that I had in mine.
“Not Jamaica or the English-owned islands, either,” he observed ruefully. “Tom Leonard and the Royal Navy may think us both dead for the moment, but they’ll be quick enough to notice otherwise if we stay for any length of time.”
“Have you thought of America?” I asked this delicately. “The Colonies, I mean.”
He rubbed his nose doubtfully.
“Well, no. I hadna really thought of it. It’s true we’d likely be safe from the Crown there, but…” He trailed off, frowning. He picked up his dirk and scored the orange, quickly and neatly, then began to peel it.
