Read Online Written in My Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon - Free Book Online

words had done to him.
    Reason had its uses, though. It was reason that reminded him of the second blow. The first had been blind reflex; the second wasn’t. Thought of it brought anger, too, and pain, but of a different sort.
    “I have had carnal knowledge of your wife.”
    “You bugger,” he whispered, clutching the reins with a reflexive violence that made the horse jerk its head, startled. “Why? Why did ye tell me that, ye bugger!”
    And the second answer came belatedly, but as clearly as the first: Because she’d tell me, the minute she had a chance. And he kent that fine. He thought if I’d do violence when I heard, best I do it to him .
    Aye, she would have told him. He swallowed. And she will tell me . What might he say—or do—when she did?
    He was trembling again and had slowed inadvertently, so the horse was nearly at a walk, head turning from side to side as it snuffed the air.
    It’s nay her fault. I know that. It’s nay her fault . They’d thought him dead. He knew what that abyss looked like; he’d lived there for a long while. And he understood what desperation and strong drink could do. But the vision—or the lack of one . . . How did it happen? Where? Knowing it had happened was bad enough; not knowing the how and the why of it from her was almost unbearable.
    The horse had stopped; the reins hung slack. Jamie was sitting in the middle of the road, eyes closed, just breathing, trying not to imagine, trying to pray.
    Reason had limits; prayer didn’t. It took a little while for his mind to relax its grip, its wicked curiosity, its lust to know . But, after a bit, he felt he could go on and gathered up the reins again.
    All that could wait. But he needed to see Claire before he did anything else. Just now he had no idea what he would say—or do—when he saw her, but he needed to see her, with the same sort of need that a man might feel who’d been cast away at sea, marooned without food or water for weeks on end.

    JOHN GREY’S BLOOD was thrumming in his ears so loudly that he barely heard the discussion among his captors, who—having taken the elementary precautions of searching him and tying his hands together in front of him—had gathered into a knot a few yards away and were heatedly hissing at one another like geese in a barnyard, casting occasional hostile glares in his direction.
    He didn’t care. He couldn’t see out of his left eye and he was by now quite certain that his liver was ruptured, but he didn’t care about that, either. He’d told Jamie Fraser the truth—the whole bloody truth—and felt the same fierce constellation of feelings that attends victory in battle: the bone-deep relief of being alive, the giddy surge of emotion that carries you on a wave much like drunkenness, then ebbs and leaves you staggering light-headed on the beach—and an absolute inability to count the cost ’til later.
    His knees experienced much the same post-battle sensations and gave way. He sat down unceremoniously in the leaves and closed his good eye.
    After a short interval in which he was aware of nothing much beyond the gradual slowing of his heart, the thrumming noise in his ears began to abate, and he noticed that someone was calling his name.
    “Lord Grey!” the voice said again, louder, and close enough that he felt a warmly fetid gust of tobacco-laden breath on his face.
    “My name is not Lord Grey,” he said, rather crossly, opening his eye. “I told you.”
    “You said you were Lord John Grey,” his interlocutor said, frowning through a mat of grizzled facial hair. It was the large man in the filthy hunting shirt who had first discovered him with Fraser.
    “I am. If you bloody have to talk to me, call me ‘my lord,’ or just ‘sir,’ if you like. What do you want?”
    The man reared back a little, looking indignant.
    “Well, since you ask . . . sir , first off, we want to know if this elder brother of yours is Major General Charles Grey.”
    “No.”
    “No?”