An Echo in the Bone (151 page)

Thus I bid you goodnight, with Assurance of my most tender Thoughts, in trust
that you will have patience with and abiding Affection for
Your Ink-stain’d Wretch and Most Devoted Husband,

James Fraser

Postscriptum: Ink-stained Wretch, indeed, as I see that I have contriv’d to
cover both my Paper and my Person with unsightly Blots. I flatter myself that the
Paper is the more disfigured.

Postscriptum 2: I have been so absorbed in Composition as to forget my
original Intent in writing: to say that I have booked Passage on the Euterpe,
sailing from Brest in two Weeks’ Time. Should anything transpire to prevent this,
I will write again.

Postscriptum 3: I yearn to lie beside you again, and know your Body complicit
with mine.

ARMED WITH DIAMONDS AND WITH STEEL

BRIANNA CUT THE brooch apart with a steady hand and a pair of kitchen shears. It was an antique but not a valuable one—an ugly Victorian thing in the shape of a sprawling silver flower surrounded by writhing vines. Its only worth lay in the scatter of small diamonds that decorated the leaves like dewdrops.

“I hope they’re big enough,” she said, and was surprised at how calm her own voice sounded.

She had been screaming inside her own head for the last thirty-six hours, which was how long it had taken them to make their plans and preparations.

“I think they’ll be fine,” Roger said, and she felt the tension under the calm of his own words. He was standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder, and the warmth of it was comfort and torment. Another hour, and he would be gone. Perhaps forever.

But there was no choice about it, and she went about the necessary things dry-eyed and steady.

Amanda, very weirdly, had fallen asleep quite suddenly after Roger and William Buccleigh had left in pursuit of Rob Cameron. Brianna had laid her in her bed and sat there watching her sleep and worrying until the men had returned near dawn with their horrifying news. But Amanda had waked as usual, sunny as the day, and apparently with no memory of her dream of screaming rocks. Neither was she bothered about Jem’s absence; she had asked once, casually, when he would be home and, receiving a noncommittal “Soon,” had gone back to her play, apparently contented.

She was with Annie now; they’d gone into Inverness to do a big shopping, with the promise of a toy. They wouldn’t be home until mid-afternoon, and by then the men would be gone.

“Why?” William Buccleigh had asked. “Why would he take your lad?”

That was the same question she and Roger had been asking themselves since the moment they discovered Jem’s loss—not that the answer was likely to help.

“Only two things it might be,” Roger had answered, his voice thick and cracked. “Time travel—or gold.”

“Gold?” Buccleigh’s dark green eyes had turned to Brianna, puzzled. “What gold?”

“The missing letter,” she’d explained, too tired to worry whether it was safe to tell him. Nothing was safe anymore, and nothing mattered. “The postscript my father wrote. Roger said you’d read the letters.
The property of an Italian gentleman—
you remember that?”

“I took no great notice,” Buccleigh admitted. “That’s gold, is it? Who’s the Italian gentleman, then?”

“Charles Stuart.” And so they’d explained, in disjoint fashion, about the gold that had come ashore in the last days of the Jacobite Rising—Buccleigh himself would have been about Mandy’s age then, Brianna thought, startled by the notion—to be divided for safety among three Scottish gentlemen, trusted tacksmen of their clans: Dougal MacKenzie, Hector Cameron, and Arch Bug, of the Grants of Leoch. She watched carefully, but he gave no sign of recognition at the name of Dougal MacKenzie. No, she thought, he doesn’t know. But that was not important now, either.

No one knew what had become of the two-thirds of the French gold held by the MacKenzies or the Grants—but Hector Cameron had fled Scotland in the last days of the Rising, the chest of gold under the seat of his carriage, and had brought it with him to the New World, where part of it had bought his plantation, River Run. The rest…

“The Spaniard guards it?” Buccleigh said, heavy fair brows knitted. “What the devil does that mean?”

“We don’t know,” Roger said. He was sitting at the table, head sunk in his hands, staring down at the wood. “Only Jem knows.” Then he had raised his head suddenly, looking at Brianna.

“The Orkneys,” he said. “Callahan.”

“What?”

“Rob Cameron,” he’d said urgently. “How old d’ye think he is?”

“I don’t know,” she’d said, confused. “Mid, late thirties, maybe. Why?”

“Callahan said Cameron went on archaeological digs with him in his early twenties. Is that far enough back—I mean, I only just now thought—” He had to stop to clear his throat and did so angrily before going on. “If he was into the ancient stuff fifteen, eighteen years ago—might he have known Geilie Duncan? Or Gillian Edgars, I suppose she still was then.”

“Oh, no,” Brianna said, but in denial, not disbelief. “Oh, no. Not another Jacobite nut!”

Roger had almost smiled at that one.

“I doubt it,” he’d said dryly. “I don’t think the man’s insane, let alone a political idealist. But he does belong to the SNP. They aren’t insane, either—but what’s the odds that Gillian Edgars would have been involved with them?”

There was no telling, not without digging into Cameron’s connections and history, and there was no time for that. But it was possible. Gillian—who’d later taken the name of a famous Scottish witch—had certainly been deeply interested both in Scottish antiquity and in Scottish politics.

She might have crossed paths with Rob Cameron, easily. And if so …

“If so,” Roger said grimly, “God only knows what she might have told him, might have left him with.” A few of Geillis’s notebooks were in his study; if Rob had known her, he would have recognized them.

“And we bloody well know he read your da’s postscript,” he added. He rubbed his forehead—there was a dark bruise along his hairline—and sighed. “It doesn’t matter, does it? The only thing that matters now is Jem.”

And so Brianna gave each of them a chunk of silver studded with small diamonds and two peanut butter sandwiches. “For the road,” she said, with a ghastly attempt at humor. Warm clothes and stout shoes. She gave Roger her Swiss army knife; Buccleigh took a stainless-steel steak knife from the kitchen, admiring its serrated edge. There wasn’t time for much more.

The sun was still high when the blue Mustang bumped along the dirt road that led near the base of Craigh na Dun; she had to be back before Mandy came home. Rob Cameron’s blue truck was still there; a shudder went through her at the sight of it.

“Go ahead,” Roger said roughly to Buccleigh when she stopped. “I’ll be along directly.”

William Buccleigh had given Brianna a quick look, direct and disconcerting, with those eyes, so like Roger’s, touched her hand briefly, and got out. Roger didn’t hesitate; he’d had time on the way to decide what to say—and there was only one thing to say, in any case.

“I love you,” he said softly, and took her by the shoulders, holding her together long enough to say the rest. “I’ll bring him back. Believe me, Bree—I’ll see you again. In
this
world.”

“I love you,” she’d said, or tried to. It came out as a soundless whisper against his mouth, but he took it, along with her breath, smiled, gripped her shoulders so hard that she would find bruises there later—and opened the door.

She’d watched them—she couldn’t help watching them—as they climbed toward the top of the hill, toward the invisible stones, until they disappeared, out of her sight. Perhaps it was imagination; perhaps she really could hear the stones up there: a weird buzzing song that lived in her bones, a memory that would live there forever. Trembling and tear-blinded, she drove home.

Carefully, carefully. Because now she was all that Mandy had.

FOOTSTEPS

LATE THAT NIGHT, she made her way to Roger’s study. She felt dull and heavy, the horror of the day blunted by fatigue. She sat at his desk, trying to feel his presence, but the room was empty.

Mandy was asleep, surprisingly unworried by the chaos of her parents’ feelings. Of course, she was used to Roger’s occasional absences, gone to London or to Oxford, lodge nights in Inverness. Would she remember him if he never came back? Brianna thought with a pang.

Unable to bear that thought, she got up and prowled restlessly round the office, seeking the unfindable. She hadn’t been able to eat anything and was feeling light-headed and friable.

She took up the little snake, finding a minimal comfort in its smooth sinuosity, its pleasant face.

She glanced up at the box, wondering whether she should seek solace in her parents’ company—but the thought of reading letters that Roger might never read with her… She put the snake down and stared blindly at the books on the lower shelves.

Beside the books on the American Revolution that Roger had ordered were her father’s books, the ones from his old office.
Franklin W. Randall
, the neat spines said, and she took one out and sat down, holding it to her chest.

She’d asked him once before for help—to look after Ian’s lost daughter. Surely he would look after Jem.

She thumbed the pages, feeling a little soothed by the friction of the paper.

Daddy
, she thought, finding no words beyond that, and needing no more. The folded sheet of paper tucked among the leaves came as no surprise at all.

The letter was a draft—she could see that at once from the crossings-out, the marginal additions, words circled with question marks. And being a draft, it had neither date nor salutation but was plainly intended for her.

You’ve just left me, dearest deadeye, after our wonderful afternoon at Sherman’s
(the clay pigeon place—will she remember the name?). My ears are still ringing.

Whenever we shoot, I’m torn between immense pride in your ability, envy of it,
and fear. I don’t know quite when you will read this, or if you will. Maybe I’ll
have the courage to tell you before I die (or I’ll do something so unforgivable that
your mother will—no, she won’t. I’ve never met anyone so honorable as Claire,
notwithstanding. She’ll keep her word).

What a queer feeling it is, writing this. I know that you’ll eventually learn who—

and perhaps what—you are. But I have no idea how you’ll come to that
knowledge. Am I about to reveal you to yourself, or will this be old news when
you find it? I can only hope that I’ve succeeded in saving your life, either way.

And that you will find it, sooner or later.

I’m sorry, sweetheart, that’s terribly melodramatic. And the last thing I want to
do is alarm you. I have all the confidence in the world in you. But I am your
father and thus prey to the fears that afflict all parents—that something dreadful
and unpreventable will happen to your child, and you powerless to protect them.

And the truth is that through no fault of your own, you are…

Here he had changed his mind several times, writing
a dangerous person
, amending that to
always in some danger
, then crossing that out in turn, adding
in a dangerous position
, crossing
that
out, and circling
a dangerous person
, though with a question mark.

“I get the point, Daddy,” she muttered. “What are you
talking
about? I—”

A sound froze the words in her throat. Footsteps were coming down the hall. Slow, confident steps. A man’s. Every hair on her body rose.

The light was on in the hall; it darkened briefly as a shape took form in the door to the study.

She stared at him, dumbfounded.

“What are
you
doing here?” Even as she spoke, she was rising from the chair, groping for something that might be used as a weapon, her mind lagging far behind her body, not yet able to penetrate the fog of horror that gripped her.

“I came for you, hen,” he said, smiling. “And for the gold.” He laid something on the desk: her parents’ first letter.
“Tell Jem the Spaniard guards it,”
Rob Cameron quoted, tapping it. “I

thought maybe it’s best you tell Jem that. And tell him to show me where this Spaniard is. If ye’d like to keep him alive, I mean. Up to you, though.” The smile widened. “Boss.”

INDEPENDENCE DAY, II

Brest

SEEING JENNY DEAL with it all was disturbing his own presence of mind considerably. He could see her heart in her throat the first time she spoke French to a real Frenchman; her pulse fluttered in the hollow of her neck like a trapped hummingbird. But the
boulanger
understood her—Brest was full of foreigners, and her peculiar accent roused no particular interest—and the sheer delight on her face when the man took her penny and handed her a baguette filled with cheese and olives made Jamie want to laugh and cry at the same time.

“He understood me!” she said, clutching him by the arm as they left. “Jamie, he understood me!