Chapter Text
In the modernized, more progressive world, I had believed it was a backwards, savage act for a man to raise a hand to his family in any circumstances. Sociology books and newsstand magazines said so as well, so I could take comfort that such a notion was a moral certainty. A man who would do it is already out of control by definition, I reckoned.
But, for a man like Jamie, who acted from a place of justice and responsibility, and stood by his actions without shame, who’s control was he out of, precisely?
Control could mean a lot of things. Demanding pacifism for some and granting unquestioned authority to act to other bodies, those with badges and under the aegis of the Elected, is certainly an effective method of control.
In that same progressive world, the best the medical profession could advise for my crushing sadness and agitation was to drug me into social acceptability, and pretend we haven’t just spent the better part of a decade murdering each other worldwide in an organized, mechanical fashion. I had endured that World War, and yet, it was Frank’s callous need for control over everything about me, including how I saw myself, that was nearly my undoing.
It was his completely non-violent breaking down of my spirit after living together for less than a year in peacetime, that had me staring at bottles of prescription sedatives at one in the morning, calculating a fatal dose for my body weight. Even when he wasn’t around, I could hear the constant barbs and cruelty disguised as suggestions and concern.
“You went to the community garden again? No wonder everyone thinks you’re some sort of cackling witch. You always have dirt on your clothes and your face is red from the sun, it’s becoming embarrassing.”
“You’re always tired lately. Don’t you ever sleep? What are those pills from the doctor for?”
“If you are going to stay home instead of coming to the faculty mixer with me, the least you can do is get more cleaning done.”
I had spent my early life traveling to various archeological sites with my Uncle Lamb, living in khaki and boots and braided hair, and then the war provided even less in the way of genteel accommodations. My parents died when I was five, so I had little memory of how my mother filled her days, and what my father did in response to her existence alongside him. I wanted to believe what Frank was saying was merely guidance for my own good.
I had no idea how to be a wife, I only knew I loved Frank.
I was never enough, but God, I tried. I tried so hard, I overlooked the unfamiliar lipstick on Frank’s collar for weeks just so I wouldn’t throw off my laundry routine. I ordered yet more pills from the back pages of women’s magazines that promised to suppress hunger. Oh, was I ever hungry!
Food became a pleasure that didn’t criticize, denigrate, or make endless-yet-contradictory demands, but any weight gain was seized upon as yet another failure. Another inconvenient feeling had to be dealt with, so I hushed the voice in my head that reminded me of my knowledge as a nurse. It was telling me the heart palpitations I was starting to have meant it wasn’t worth it. I told it to shut up, until the day I collapsed in our neighbor’s backyard during a birthday party for their young son.
I came to on the well-manicured lawn with Frank, the neighbors, Millie and Jerry Nelson, and the clown they had hired for entertainment all staring down at me. Millie, the slightly hyperactive, perpetually smiling woman of the house, put her arm around my shoulders after Frank and the clown got me back on my feet, and gently guided me into the house, waving away the men like pesky insects.
“Don’t worry for a moment, dear. We all get a little overwhelmed at times,” Millie chattered in an attempt at casual dismissal of any concerns. “I’m sure I have just the thing around here somewhere.”
I was deposited into a chair in the sitting room, and a puffy yellow ottoman was shoved under my feet. Before I could accept or decline, a glass of straight bourbon was put in my hand.
“That and getting out of the heat for a bit should work wonders,” Millie assured me while I checked my pulse at the neck, feeling a fast but steady drumbeat.
“I think I’ll be fine. Thank you, Millie,” I said, hearing my voice sound slightly croaky, and trying to remember when I last drank any water.
“You know,” Millie whispered conspiratorially. “My pills are in the upstairs bathroom. If you need something to perk you up, I have the white ones, the pink ones, the smaller white ones that work faster…”
I sipped the drink solely as an excuse to say I was just fine and she need not trouble herself any further. When enough had been consumed that I felt it would be acceptable to ask for a glass of water, Millie pranced off to the kitchen and I took the opportunity to stare at nothing and feel myself breathe for a few moments. Being alone with my own thoughts wasn’t so bad, I decided.
But, my own thoughts were still barely more than blades of grass, not something sturdy enough to fully take shelter within, and Frank’s voice calling through the back door dragged me from a fragile peace into the constant dance across unsteady ground that had become every interaction with him.
“Is Claire still up to her antics, or can she come back out and be a normal person for a half-hour until the party ends?”
That night, I threw out my pills. I didn’t sleep at all, but in the morning, I started to pack my things.
…………………
Lallybroch
Summer, 1752
And the earlier days of parenthood, marriage, and family
In the years since I tumbled through those standing stones, I had gotten used to a lot of things about living two hundred years in the past. My husband’s easy acceptance of velvet-gloved violence as an integral part of love still was not one of them.
It was so easy, in fact, that after the first real occasion of corporal punishment he had carried out on one of our children, he argued with me on the notion that such measures qualified as “violence” at all.
“Ye do what ye have to for the good of the patients ye tend, do ye not?” Jamie asked that day, in an attempt to console me through reason after the first time he spanked Brianna. “Even if it causes them pain? Ye wouldna leave a rotting tooth or gangrenous limb to fester, even if the removal is agony?”
Admittedly, I had contemplated the nature of my calling as a healer, and whether or not it was a violent one, long before that day. I’d often done things that were objectively painful and difficult, though not harmful in comparison to leaving things to take their course. It is hard not to question how ghoulish one’s own nature may be when one goes numb to terrible, visceral bodily injuries. But, when suturing the testicles of a man who had gotten up close and personal with an enemy bayonet is NOT a stomach-churning experience, or even very emotionally moving at all, there’s a better chance you will do it right, and the healing process will go more smoothly.
It is merely work that must be done.
Jamie had been a soldier in his youth, had seen death and bloodshed up close, and knew it with more immediacy than he knew anything else, except perhaps the way he knew me. He had killed men in battle, fighting with a mercenary band in France before we met; watched them bleed the ground red for the nebulous motives of the rich and the royal, but really doing it for no other reason than they would spill his blood first if he did not. I never asked him how many, but there was a possibility he didn’t know.
And I knew Jamie would do far worse to any threat to me, Brianna, or William. A few swats across his daughter’s bottom and a firm talking-to was a fly’s bite on an elephant’s arse in Jamie’s understanding of suffering. Her tears and shouts were a harder sting for me to bear, even though I was just as outraged as he was by how she had acted that afternoon.
“But why contribute to the suffering in the world, then? I wouldn’t do any of that if I had an effective alternative. Can’t it be avoided, somehow?” I countered, still clinging to my 1940s, Modern Family Magazine ideals of enlightened parenting, though I was seeing how fragile all their premises were against the aggressive, mercurial shifts of time.
In Jamie’s world, it was easy to accept that force meets force, even if it is painful. Well, wasn’t it the same in any world? Is it not just a matter of how far removed from the machinery of war, justice and authority one might be? Being blind to it doesn’t mean it is not happening. One may not live in a crime-ridden part of town in 1946, but an average person is generally approving of the police chasing down, handcuffing and jailing criminals for the good of the community. Those are actions of violence that are counted upon to ensure a safe place for that person to sip a cocktail with friends, discussing the deficient morality of a man who would spank his children, or, heaven forbid, his wife.
In the future, family patriarchs are often stifled in their authority and shamed for any physical exercise of it, but the nameless, faceless apparatus of the state is encouraged to force obedience to the law. Though I would not be there to see it, I sometimes wondered what this redistribution of socially acceptable force would yield into the coming centuries.
The sheer volume of government-led violence I had seen was more than Jamie could imagine, for he knew nothing of the technology and innovations of the time that were refitted for the purposes of war. In my previous life, I worked to save those staining the battlefields of France, the same grounds where Jamie had offered his own sweat and blood in the past. In all truth, and just like him, I had relied on the weapons and the will of the men around me in order to do it.
The people closest to me, by proximity and by heart, have always been the ones by whose actions I live or die. I had not thought of it in those terms at the time, but now it was knowledge burned deep into my very bones. Did I really have any excuse for feigned innocence then, especially after what had happened in my first marriage? Without spilling a drop of blood or causing a single bruise, Frank Randall brought me closer to death than my service in the British Army ever did, because he was what mattered most to me, at the time.
No, I will never fully get used to Jamie’s worldview, interweaving a controlled application of pain with the love and care he gave us so freely. I will never submit easily should Jamie decide a boundary must be drawn, and a correction to my behavior is necessary. I cannot do it easily even knowing this right he claims is linked inextricably with his obligation toward my well being. I cannot do it easily even if I cannot argue his logic, nor even when my own conscience confirms the error.
The tears I shed when over his lap or bent over the bed are genuine, full of outrage at the conflict between two facts; barring the very first time when I didn’t understand his motives, I was submitting to him of my own will, but, I still did not want him to do it.
And yet, I am alive and thriving under his rule.
I no longer haunt myself in the night with morbid debates of exactly how I should die. I sleep in Jamie’s arms, drifting off to words of love and promise. I awaken and move through my days with a vision for something bigger, for the future of our family, business and estate, because I know I am in a place where my presence not only matters, but is wanted and valued.
“Without you, Sassenach,” he has often told me. “Our whole world crumbles into dust.”
In the Laird’s bedchamber at Lallybroch the night after Brianna’s “incident,” the trust Jamie had earned from me during our marriage gave me a chance to be honest, with all the vulnerability that comes with it. Sighing in resignation, my heart poured out to him.
“I just hate seeing either of our children suffer.”
There it was. Motherhood had broken through every tough exterior I could put on with the force of dynamite. The people I carried and birthed from my own body just walking around in the world at risk of harm seemed like a cruel trick of God. Acceptance of Jamie’s ways and time for myself was one thing, but could I accept it on behalf of our five-year-old daughter?
“Do ye not see, Sassenach? Keeping Brianna from suffering is exactly what I was aiming to do. Better she learn the lesson she did today, at five years old, than when she’s old enough for it to really matter…”