Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(111)

“Oh, dear!” he said. “Oh, no! No, no, no—they’re all right, sir, your family’s all right! Did you hear me?” he asked anxiously. “Can you breathe? Had I best fetch you some salts, do you think?”

It took Jerry several tries to make it to his feet, hampered both by his knee and by Mr. Wardlaw’s fumbling attempts to help him, but by the time he’d got all the way up, he’d regained the power of speech.

“Where?” he gasped. “Where are they?”

“Why—your missus took the little boy and went to stay with her mother, sometime after you left. I don’t recall quite where she said…” Mr. Wardlaw turned, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the river. “Camberwell, was it?”

“Bethnal Green.” Jerry’s mind had come back, though it felt still as though it was a pebble rolling round the rim of some bottomless abyss, its balance uncertain. He tried to dust himself off, but his hands were shaking. “She lives in Bethnal Green. You’re sure—you’re sure, man?”

“Yes, yes.” The grocer was altogether relieved, smiling and nodding so hard that his jowls trembled. “She left—must be more than a year ago, soon after she—soon after she…” The old man’s smile faded abruptly and his mouth slowly opened, a flabby dark hole of horror.

“But you’re dead, Mr. MacKenzie,” he whispered, backing away, hands held up before him. “Oh, God. You’re dead.”



“THE FUCK I AM, the fuck I am, the fuck I am!” He caught sight of a woman’s startled face and stopped abruptly, gulping air like a landed fish. He’d been weaving down the shattered street, fists pumping, limping and staggering, muttering his private motto under his breath like the Hail Marys of a rosary. Maybe not as far under his breath as he’d thought.

He stopped, leaning against the marble front of the Bank of England, panting. He was streaming with sweat and the right leg of his trousers was heavily streaked with dried blood from the fall. His knee was throbbing in time with his heart, his face, his hands, his thoughts. They’re alive. So am I.

The woman he’d startled was down the street, talking to a policeman; she turned, pointing at him. He straightened up at once, squaring his shoulders. Braced his knee and gritted his teeth, forcing it to bear his weight as he strode down the street, officerlike. The very last thing he wanted just now was to be taken up as drunk.

He marched past the policeman, nodding politely, touching his forehead in lieu of cap. The policeman looked taken aback, made to speak but couldn’t quite decide what to say, and a moment later, Jerry was round the corner and away.

It was getting dark. There weren’t many cabs in this area at the best of times—none at all, now, and he hadn’t any money, anyway. The Tube. If the lines were open, it was the fastest way to Bethnal Green. And surely he could cadge the fare from someone. Somehow. He went back to limping, grimly determined. He had to reach Bethnal Green by dark.



IT WAS SO much changed. Like the rest of London. Houses damaged, halfway repaired, abandoned, others no more than a blackened depression or a heap of rubble. The air was thick with cold dust, stone dust, and the smells of paraffin and cooking grease, the brutal, acrid smell of cordite.

Half the streets had no signs, and he wasn’t so familiar with Bethnal Green to begin with. He’d visited Dolly’s mother just twice, once when they went to tell her they’d run off and got married—she hadn’t been best pleased, Mrs. Wakefield, but she’d put a good face on it, even if the face had a lemon-sucking look to it.

The second time had been when he signed up with the RAF; he’d gone alone to tell her, to ask her to look after Dolly while he was gone. Dolly’s mother had gone white. She knew as well as he did what the life expectancy was for fliers. But she’d told him she was proud of him, and held his hand tight for a long moment before she let him leave, saying only, “Come back, Jeremiah. She needs you.”

He soldiered on, skirting craters in the street, asking his way. It was nearly full dark, now; he couldn’t be on the streets much longer. His anxiety began to ease a little as he started to see things he knew, though. Close, he was getting close.

And then the sirens began, and people began to pour out of the houses.

He was being buffeted by the crowd, borne down the street as much by their barely controlled panic as by their physical impact. There was shouting, people calling for separated family members, wardens bellowing directions, waving their torches, their flat, white helmets pale as mushrooms in the gloom. Above it, through it, the air-raid siren pierced him like a sharpened wire, thrust him down the street on its spike, ramming him into others likewise skewered by fright.

The tide of it swept round the next corner, and he saw the red circle with its blue line over the entrance to the Tube station, lit up by a warden’s flashlight. He was sucked in, propelled through sudden bright lights, hurtling down the stair, the next, onto a platform, deep into the earth, into safety. And all the time the whoop and moan of the sirens still filling the air, barely muffled by the dirt above.

There were wardens moving among the crowd, pushing people back against the walls, into the tunnels, away from the edge of the track. He brushed up against a woman with two toddlers, picked one—a little girl with round eyes and a blue teddy bear—out of her arms and turned his shoulder into the crowd, making a way for them. He found a small space in a tunnel-mouth, pushed the woman into it, and gave her back the little girl. Her mouth moved in thanks, but he couldn’t hear her above the noise of the crowd, the sirens, the creaking, the—