Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(195)

“What—”

“Your bloody baby kicked me in the liver!”

“Oh.” Hal looked somewhat abashed. “You mean your name really is Wattiswade, then.”

“Yes, I do.”

He took a deep breath.

“All right. Wattiswade. Why—never mind. You’ll tell me later why you’ve been calling yourself Rennie.”

“No, I won’t.”

He glanced at her, brows raised high, and she could see him—for once—debating whether to say something. But then his eyes lost the look of a man talking to himself and focused on hers.

“All right,” he said softly, and held out his hand to her, palm upward.

She took another breath, looked out into the void, and jumped.

“Cunnegunda,” she said, and put her hand in his. “Minerva Cunnegunda Wattiswade.”

He said nothing, but she could feel him vibrating slightly. She carefully didn’t look at him. Harry seemed to be arguing about something with the woman—something to do with the need for a second witness, she thought, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the words. The smell of tobacco smoke and stale sweat was making her gorge rise again, and she swallowed hard, several times.

All right. They’d decided that Mrs. Ten Boom could be the second witness. Good. Mortimer turned a somersault, landing heavily. Perspiration had broken out on Minnie’s temples, and her ears felt hot.

Suddenly she was possessed by the fear that her father would burst through the door at any moment. She wasn’t afraid of his stopping this impromptu ceremony; she was quite sure Hal wouldn’t let him—and that certainty steadied her. Still…she didn’t want him here. This was hers alone.

“Hurry,” she said to Hal, in a low voice. “Please, hurry.”

“Get on with it,” he said to the minister, in a voice that wasn’t particularly loud but plainly expected to be obeyed. The Reverend Ten Boom blinked, coughed, and opened his book.

It was all in Dutch; she could have followed the words but didn’t—what echoed in her ears were the never-spoken phrases from the letters.

Not Esmé’s—his. Letters written to a dead wife, in passionate grief, in fury, in despair. He might as well have punctured his own wrist with the sharpened quill and written those words in blood. She looked up at him now, white as the winter sky, as though all the blood had run out of his body, leaving him drained.

But his eyes were a pale and piercing blue when he turned his dark-browed face toward her, and the fire in him was not quenched, by any means.

You didn’t deserve him, she thought toward the absent Esmé and rested her free hand on her gently heaving stomach. But you loved him. Don’t fret; I’ll take care of them both.





AUTHOR’S NOTE


IF YOU NEVER read Madeleine L’Engle’s marvelous A Wrinkle in Time in your younger years, it’s not too late. It’s a wonderful story and I highly recommend it. If you did read it, though, you’ll certainly remember this iconic line: There is such a thing as a tesseract.

In fact, there is such a thing as a tesseract, both as a geometrical and a scientific concept: Putting it crudely, it’s a four-dimensional construct, in which the fourth dimension is time. And it’s used as a fictional device to bring two separate space/time lines together, obviating the linear time between them. Much more convenient than a clunky old time machine.

Now, it’s also a well-known fact that I stink at ages. I have only the vaguest general notion as to how old anyone in these stories is at any given point, I usually don’t know when their birthdays are, and I don’t really care. This drives both my copy editor and the more OCD-prone of my readers to distraction, and they Aren’t Going to Be Happy about this, but really, there’s no choice.

When I wrote The Scottish Prisoner, I randomly assigned ages to Hal’s and Minnie’s young sons, never thinking we’d see them again until they were adults (we have in fact seen all of them at one time or another as adults in An Echo in the Bone and in Written in My Own Heart’s Blood).

Now…I also noted in The Scottish Prisoner that Jamie Fraser had met Minnie prior to her marriage, in Paris, and that they had known each other in the context of the Jacobite plots of that time. That’s something of a plot point, has to do with both their characters and their subsequent actions, and so is important.

And I allowed Minnie to tell Lord John the circumstances of her marriage to his brother Hal. That’s also important, as indicating something of the relationships between Minnie and Hal and just why he calls on her for help in intelligence matters at various points in later stories.

So—those two facts are important. How old the kids are isn’t important.

But going back to tell more of Minnie and Hal’s backstory, naturally I wanted to include Minnie’s acquaintance with Jamie Fraser. Okay, that had to take place sometime in 1744, when the Frasers were in Paris, plotting away.

Minnie’s pregnancy and the impending birth of her first son, Benjamin, had much to do with the marriage between Minnie and Hal and with her feelings about it. Ergo, Benjamin has to have been conceived sometime in 1744.

As the more nitpicking sort of reader will have instantly realized, if Benjamin was conceived in 1744 and born in 1745—as he has to have been—then he can’t have been eight years old in 1760, when The Scottish Prisoner takes place. Only he was.