He had been standing next to Jenny when Ian died. She had sighed and seemed to slump beside him, as though the iron rod that had run up her back for the last year had suddenly been pulled out through her head. Her face had shown no sorrow, though he knew it was there; for that moment, though, she had only been glad it was over – for Ian’s sake, for all their sakes. So surely they had found time, she and Ian, to say what had to be said between them, in the months since they knew.
(...)
‘No, I mean I want to leave here. Lallybroch. For good.’ That took him aback more than a bit.
‘Ye dinna mean that, I think,’ he said at last, cautious. ‘It’s been a shock, after all. Ye shouldna –’
She shook her head and put a hand to her breast. ‘Something’s broken in me, Jamie,’ she said softly. ‘Whatever it was that bound me … it binds me nay more.’
He didn’t know what to say. He’d avoided the sight of the broch and the burying ground at its foot when he came out of the house, unable to bear the dark wet patch of raw ground there – but now he turned his head deliberately and raised his chin to point at it. ‘And ye’d leave Ian?’ he asked.
She made a small noise in her throat. Her hand lay against her breast still, and at this she pressed it flat, fierce against her heart. ‘Ian’s with me,’ she said, and her back straightened in defiance of the fresh-dug grave. ‘He’ll never leave me, nor I him.’ She turned her head and looked at him then; her eyes were red, but dry. ‘He’ll never leave ye, either, Jamie,’ she said. ‘Ye ken that, as well as I do.’
An Echo in the Bone, Chapter 84
Fan’s Choice: Jenny & Ian Murray or Fergus & Marsali Fraser
