A Breath of Snow and Ashes (87 page)

“What
was
there?” I asked, glancing out of the pantry to be sure we were not overheard. The kitchen looked as though a bomb had gone off in it, but only a scullion was there, a half-witted boy who was washing pots, singing softly to himself.

“Part of an ingot of gold,” Ulysses replied softly.

The French gold Hector Cameron had brought away from Scotland, ten thousand pounds in bullion, cast in ingots and marked with the royal fleur-de-lis, was the foundation of River Run’s wealth. But it would not do, of course, for that fact to be known. First Hector, and then, after Hector’s death, Ulysses, had taken one of the gold bars and scraped bits of the soft yellow metal into a small, anonymous heap. This could then be taken to the river warehouses—or for additional safety, sometimes as far as the coastal towns of Edenton, Wilmington, or New Bern—and there carefully changed, in small amounts that would cause no comment, into cash or warehouse certificates, which could safely be used anywhere.

“There was about half of the ingot left,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the cavity in the wall. “I found it gone a few months ago. Since then, of course, I have contrived a new hiding place.”

Jamie looked into the empty cavity, then turned to Ulysses.

“The rest?”

“Safe enough, last time I checked, sir.” The bulk of the gold was concealed inside Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, hidden in a coffin and guarded, presumably, by his spirit. One or two of the slaves besides Ulysses might know about it, but the very lively fear of ghosts was enough to keep everyone away. I remembered the line of salt spread on the ground in front of the mausoleum, and shivered a little, in spite of the stifling heat in the basement.

“I could not, of course, make shift to look today,” the butler added.

“No, of course not. Duncan knows?” Jamie nodded toward the recess, and Ulysses nodded.

“The thief might have been anyone. So many people come to this house. . . .” The butler’s massive shoulders moved in a small shrug. “But now that this man from the sea has come again—it puts a different face upon the matter, does it not, sir?”

“Aye, it does.” Jamie contemplated the matter for a moment, tapping two fingers softly against his leg.

“Well, then. Ye’ll need to stay for a bit, Sassenach, will ye not? To look after my aunt’s eye?”

I nodded. Provided no infection resulted from my crude intervention, there was little or nothing I could do for the eye itself. But it should be watched, kept clean and irrigated, until I could be sure it was healed.

“We’ll stay, then, for a bit,” he said, turning to Ulysses. “I’ll send the Bugs back to the Ridge, to mind things and see to the haying. We’ll stay, and watch.”

THE HOUSE WAS FULL of guests, but I slept in Jocasta’s dressing room, so that I might keep an eye on her. The easing of pressure in her eye had relieved the excruciating pain, and she had fallen soundly asleep, her vital signs reassuring enough that I felt I could sleep, too.

Knowing I had a patient, though, I slept lightly, waking at intervals to tiptoe into her room. Duncan was sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed, dead to the world from the exhaustions of the day. I could hear his heavy breathing, as I lit a taper from the hearth and came to stand by the bed.

Jocasta was still soundly asleep, lying on her back, arms crossed gracefully over the coverlet and her head thrown back, sternly long-nosed and aristocratic as the tomb figures in the chapel of St. Denys. All she wanted was a crown, and a small dog of some kind crouched at her feet.

I smiled at the thought, thinking as I did how odd it was: Jamie slept in exactly that fashion, lying flat on his back, hands crossed, straight as an arrow. Brianna didn’t; she was a wild sleeper, and had been from a child. Like me.

The thought gave me a small, unexpected feeling of pleasure. I knew I had given her some parts of me, of course, but she resembled Jamie so strongly, it was always something of a surprise to notice one.

I blew out the taper, but didn’t at once return to bed. I had taken Phaedre’s cot in the dressing room, but it was a hot, airless little space. The hot day and the consumption of alcohol had left me cotton-mouthed, with a vague headache; I picked up the carafe from Jocasta’s bedside, but it was empty.

No need to relight the taper; one of the sconces in the hallway was still burning, and a dim glow outlined the door. I pushed it open quietly and looked out. The corridor was lined with bodies—servants sleeping by the doors of the bedrooms—and the air throbbed gently with the snoring and heavy breathing of a great many people sunk in slumber of varying degrees.

At the end of the corridor, though, one pale figure stood upright, looking out through the tall casement window toward the river.

She must have heard me, but didn’t turn around. I came to stand beside her, looking out. Phaedre was undressed to her shift, her hair free of its cloth and falling in a soft thick mass around her shoulders. Rare for a slave to have such hair, I thought; most women kept their hair very short under turban or headcloth, lacking both time and tools for dressing it. But Phaedre was a body servant; she would have some leisure—and a comb, at least.

“Would you like your bed back?” I asked, low-voiced. “I’ll be up for a while—and can sleep on the divan.”

She glanced at me, and shook her head.

“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said softly. “Thankee kindly; I ain’t sleepy.” She saw the carafe I carried, and reached for it. “I fetch you some water, ma’am?”

“No, no, I’ll do it. I’d like the air.” Still, I stood beside her, looking out.

It was a beautiful night, thick with stars that hung low and bright over the river, a faint silver thread that wound its way through the dark. There was a moon, a slender sickle, riding low on its way below the curve of the earth, and one or two small campfires burned in the trees beside the river.

The window was open, and bugs were swarming in; a small cloud of them danced around the candle in the sconce behind us, and tiny winged things brushed my face and arms. Crickets sang, so many of them that their song was a high, constant sound, like a bow drawn over violin strings.

Phaedre moved to shut it—to sleep with a window open was considered most unhealthy, and likely
was,
given the various mosquito-borne diseases in this swampish atmosphere.

“I thought I heard something. Out there,” she said, nodding toward the dark below.

“Oh? Probably my husband,” I said. “Or Ulysses.”

“Ulysses?” she said, looking startled.

Jamie, Ian, and Ulysses had organized a system of patrol, and were doubtless out somewhere in the night, gliding round the house and keeping an eye on Hector’s mausoleum, just in case. Knowing nothing of the disappearing gold nor Jocasta’s mysterious visitor, though, Phaedre wouldn’t be aware of the increased vigilance, save in the indirect way in which slaves always knew things—the instinct that had doubtless roused her to look out the window.

“They’re just keeping an eye out,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “With so many people here, you know.” The MacDonalds had gone to Farquard Campbell’s plantation to spend the night, and a goodly number of guests had gone with them, but there were still a lot of people on the premises.

She nodded, but looked troubled.

“It just feel like something ain’t right,” she said. “Don’t know what ’tis.”

“Your mistress’s eye—” I began, but she shook her head.

“No. No. I don’t know, but there something in the air; I be feelin’ it. Not just tonight, I don’t mean—something goin’ on. Something coming.” She looked at me, helpless to express what she meant, but her mood communicated itself to me.

It might be in part simply the heightened emotions of the oncoming conflict. One could in fact feel that in the air. But there might be something else, too—something subterranean, barely sensed, but there, like the dim form of a sea serpent, glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, and so put down to legend.

“My grannie, she taken from Africa,” Phaedre said softly, staring out at the night. “She talk to the bones. Say they tell her when bad things comin’.”

“Really?” In such an atmosphere, quiet save the night sounds, so many souls adrift around us, there seemed nothing unreal about such a statement. “Did she teach you to . . . talk to bones?”

She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth tucked in, a small, secret expression, and I thought she might know more about it than she was willing to say.

One unwelcome thought had occurred to me. I didn’t see how Stephen Bonnet could be connected to present events—surely he was not the man who had spoken to Jocasta out of her past, and just as surely, stealthy theft was not his style. But he did have some reason to believe there might be gold somewhere at River Run—and from what Roger had told us of Phaedre’s encounter with the big Irishman in Cross Creek . . .

“The Irishman you met, when you were out with Jemmy,” I said, changing my grip on the slick surface of the carafe, “have you ever seen him again?”

She looked surprised at that; clearly Bonnet was the farthest thing from her mind.

“No, ma’am,” she said. “Ain’t seen him again, ever.” She thought for a moment, big eyes hooded. She was the color of strong coffee with a dash of cream, and her hair—there had been a white man in her family tree at some time, I thought.

“No, ma’am,” she repeated softly, and turned her troubled gaze back to the quiet night and the sinking moon. “All I know—something ain’t right.”

Out by the stables, a rooster began to crow, the sound out of place and eerie in the dark.

55

WENDIGO

August 20, 1774

T
HE LIGHT IN THE MORNING room was perfect.

“We began with this room,” Jocasta had told her great-niece, raising her face to the sun that poured through the open double doors to the terrace, lids closed over her blind eyes. “I wanted a room to paint in, and chose this spot, where the light would come in, bright as crystal in the morning, like still water in the afternoon. And then we built the house around it.” The old woman’s hands, still long-fingered and strong, touched the easel, the pigment pots, the brushes, with affectionate regret, as she might caress the statue of a long-dead lover—a passion recalled, but accepted as forever gone.

And Brianna, sketching block and pencil in hand, had drawn as quickly, as covertly as she could, to catch that fleeting expression of grief outlived.

That sketch lay with the others in the bottom of her box, against the day when she might try it in more finished form, try to catch that merciless light, and the deep-carved lines of her aunt’s face, strong bones stark in the sun she could not see.

For now, though, the painting at hand was a matter of business, rather than love or art. Nothing suspicious had happened since Flora MacDonald’s barbecue, but her parents meant to stay for a little longer, just in case. With Roger still in Charlotte—he had written to her; the letter was secreted in the bottom of her box, with the private sketches—there was no reason why she shouldn’t stay, too. Hearing of her continued presence, two or three of Jocasta’s acquaintances, wealthy planters, had commissioned portraits of themselves or their families; a welcome source of income.

“I will never understand how ye do that,” Ian said, shaking his head at the canvas on her easel. “It’s wonderful.”

In all honesty, she didn’t understand how she did it, either; it didn’t seem necessary. She’d said as much in answer to similar compliments before, though, and realized that such an answer generally struck the hearer either as false modesty or as condescension.

She smiled at him, instead, letting the glow of pleasure she felt show in her face.

“When I was little, my father would take me walking on the Common, and we’d see an old man there often, painting with an easel. I used to make Daddy stop so I could watch, and he and the old man would chat. I mostly just stared, but once I got up the nerve to ask him how he did that and he looked down at me and smiled, and said, ‘The only trick, sweetie, is to see what you’re looking at.’”

Ian looked from her to the picture, then back, as though comparing the portrait with the hand that had made it.

“Your father,” he said, interested. He lowered his voice, glancing toward the door into the hallway. There were voices, but not close. “Ye dinna mean Uncle Jamie?”

“No.” She felt the familiar small ache at the thought of her first father, but put it aside. She didn’t mind telling Ian about him—but not here, with slaves all over the place and a constant flow of visitors who might pop in at any moment.

“Look.” She glanced over her shoulder to be sure no one was near, but the slaves were talking loudly in the foyer, arguing over a misplaced boot scraper. She lifted the cover of the small compartment that held spare brushes, and reached under the strip of felt that lined it.

“What do you think?” She held the pair of miniatures out for his inspection, one in either palm.

The look of expectation on his face changed to outright fascination, and he reached slowly for one of the tiny paintings.

“I will be damned,” he said. It was the one of her mother, her hair long and curling loose on bare shoulders, the small firm chin raised with an authority that belied the generous curve of the mouth above.

“The eyes—I don’t think those are quite right,” she said, peering into his hand. “Working so small . . . I couldn’t get the color, exactly. Da’s were much easier.”

Blues just
were
easier. A tiny dab of cobalt, highlighted with white and that faint green shadow that intensified the blue while vanishing itself . . . well, and that was Da, too. Strong, vivid, and straightforward.

To get a brown with true depth and subtlety, though, let alone something that even approximated the smoky topaz of her mother’s eyes—always clear, but changing like the light on a peat-brown trout stream—that needed more underpainting than was really possible in the tiny space of a miniature. She’d have to try again sometime, with a larger portrait.

“Are they like, do you think?”

“They’re wonderful.” Ian looked from one to the other, then he put the portrait of Claire gently back into its place. “Have your parents seen them yet?”

“No. I wanted to be sure they were right, before I showed them to anybody. But if they are—I’m thinking I can show them to the people who come to sit, and maybe get commissions for more miniatures. Those I could work on at home, on the Ridge; all I’d need is my paint box and the little ivory discs. I could do the painting from the sketches; I wouldn’t need the sitter to keep coming.”

She made a brief, explanatory gesture toward the large canvas she was working on, which showed Farquard Campbell, looking rather like a stuffed ferret in his best suit, surrounded by numerous children and grandchildren, most of these mere whitish blobs at the moment. Her strategy was to have their mothers drag the small ones in one at a time, to have each child’s limbs and features hastily sketched into the appropriate blob before natural wriggliness or tantrums obtruded.

Ian glanced at the canvas, but his attention returned to the miniatures of her parents. He stood looking at them, a slight smile on his long, half-homely face. Then, feeling her eyes on him, he glanced up, alarmed.

“Oh, no, ye don’t!”

“Oh, come on, Ian, let me just sketch you,” she coaxed. “It won’t hurt, you know.”

“Och, that’s what you think,” he countered, backing away as though the pencil she had taken up might be a weapon. “The Kahnyen’kehaka think to have a likeness of someone gives ye power over them. That’s why the medicine society wear false faces—so the demons causing the illness willna have their true likeness and willna ken who to hurt, aye?”

This was said in such a serious tone that she squinted at him, to see whether he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.

“Mmm. Ian—Mama explained to you about germs, didn’t she?”

“Aye, she did, o’ course,” he said, in a tone exhibiting no conviction at all. “She showed me things swimmin’ about, and said they were livin’ in my teeth!” His face showed momentary repugnance at the notion, but he left the matter to return to the subject at hand.

“There was a traveling Frenchman came to the village once, a natural philosopher—he’d drawings he’d made of birds and animals, and that astonished them—but then he made the mistake of offering to make a likeness of the war chief’s wife. I barely got him out in one piece.”

“But you aren’t a Mohawk,” she said patiently, “and if you were—you’re not afraid of me having power over you, are you?”

He turned his head and gave her a sudden queer look that went through her like a knife through butter.

“No,” he said. “No, of course not.” But his voice had little more conviction than when discussing germs.

Still, he moved to the stool she kept for sitters, set in good light from the open doors that led to the terrace, and sat down, chin lifted and jaw set like one about to be heroically executed.

Suppressing a smile, she took up the sketching block and drew as quickly as she could, lest he change his mind. He was a difficult subject; his features lacked the solid, clear-cut bone structure that both her parents and Roger had. And yet it was in no way a soft face, even discounting the stippled tattoos that curved from the bridge of his nose across his cheeks.

Young and fresh, and yet the firmness of his mouth—it was slightly crooked, she saw with interest; how had she never noticed that before?—belonged to someone much older, bracketed by lines that would cut much deeper with age, but were already firmly entrenched.

The eyes . . . she despaired of getting those right. Large and hazel, they were his one claim to beauty, and yet, beautiful was the last thing you would call them. Like most eyes, they weren’t one color at all, but many—the colors of autumn, dark wet earth and crackling oak leaves, and the touch of setting sun on dry grass.

The color was a challenge, but one she could meet. The expression, though—it changed in an instant from something so guilelessly amiable as to seem almost half-witted to something you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

The expression at present was somewhere between these two extremes, but shifted suddenly toward the latter as his attention focused on the open doors behind her, and the terrace beyond.

She glanced over her shoulder, startled. Someone was there; she saw the edge of his—or her—shadow, but the person who threw it was keeping out of sight. Whoever it was began to whistle, a tentative, breathy sound.

For an instant, everything was normal. Then the world shifted. The intruder was whistling “Yellow Submarine.”

All the blood rushed from her head, and she swayed, grabbing the edge of an occasional table to keep from falling. Dimly, she sensed Ian rising like a cat from his stool, seizing one of her palette knives, and sliding noiselessly out of the room into the hallway.

Her hands had gone cold and numb; so had her lips. She tried to whistle a phrase in reply, but nothing but a little air emerged. Straightening up, she took hold of herself, and sang the last few words instead. She could barely manage the tune, but there was no doubt of the words.

Dead silence from the terrace; the whistling had stopped.

“Who are you?” she said clearly. “Come in.”

The shadow lengthened slowly, showing a head like a lion’s, light shining through the curls, glowing on the terrace stones. The head itself poked cautiously into sight around the corner of the door. It was an Indian, she saw, with astonishment, though his dress was mostly European—and ragged—bar a wampum necklet. He was lean and dirty, with close-set eyes, which were fixed on her with eagerness and something like avidity.

“You alone, man?” he asked, in a hoarse whisper. “Thought I heard voices.”

“You can see I am. Who on earth are you?”

“Ah . . . Wendigo. Wendigo Donner. Your name’s Fraser, right?” He had edged all the way into the room now, though still glancing warily from side to side.

“My maiden name, yes. Are you—” She stopped, not sure how to ask.

“Yeah,” he said softly, looking her up and down in a casual way that no man of the eighteenth century would have employed to a lady. “So are you, aren’t you? You’re her daughter, you have to be.” He spoke with a certain intensity, moving closer.

She didn’t think he meant her harm; he was just very interested. Ian didn’t wait to see, though; there was a brief darkening of the light from the door, and then he had Donner from behind, the Indian’s squawk of alarm choked off by the arm across his throat, the point of the palette knife jabbing him under the ear.

“Who are ye, arsebite, and what d’ye want?” Ian demanded, tightening the arm across Donner’s throat. The Indian’s eyes bulged, and he made small mewling noises.

“How do you expect him to answer you, if you’re choking him?” This appeal to reason caused Ian to relax his grip, albeit reluctantly. Donner coughed, rubbing his throat ostentatiously, and shot Ian a resentful look.

“No need for that, man, I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to her.” Donner’s eyes went from her to Ian and back. He jerked his head toward Ian. “Is he . . . ?”

“No, but he knows. Sit down. You met my mother when she—when she was kidnapped, didn’t you?”

Ian’s feathery brows shot up at this, and he took a firmer grip on the palette knife, which was flexible but had a definite point.

“Yeah.” Donner lowered himself gingerly onto the stool, keeping a wary eye on Ian. “Man, they nearly got me. Your mother, she told me her old man was gnarly and I didn’t want to be there when he showed up, but I didn’t believe her. Almost, I didn’t. But when I heard those drums, man, I bugged out, and a damn good thing I did, too.” He swallowed, looking pale. “I went back, in the morning. Jeez, man.”

Ian said something under his breath, in what Brianna thought was Mohawk. It sounded unfriendly in the extreme, and Donner evidently discerned enough of the meaning to make him scoot his stool a little farther away, hunching his shoulders.

“Hey, man, I didn’t do nothin’ to her, okay?” He looked pleadingly at Brianna. “I didn’t! I was gonna help her get away—ask her, she’ll tell you! Only Fraser and his guys showed up before I could. Christ, why would I hurt her? She’s the first one I found back here—I needed her!”

“The first one?” Ian said, frowning. “The first—”

“The first . . . traveler, he means,” Brianna said. Her heart was beating fast. “What did you need her for?”

“To tell me how to get—back.” He swallowed again, his hand going to the wampum ornament around his neck. “You—did you come through, or were you born here? I’m figuring you came through,” he added, not waiting for an answer. “They don’t grow ’em as big as you now. Little bitty girls. Me, I like a big woman.” He smiled, in what he plainly intended to be an ingratiating manner.