The Fiery Cross (107 page)

I bit the inside of my lower lip, trying to think of anything or anyone that might possibly give her comfort. Jocasta? Did Jocasta even know of Betty’s death yet? Duncan knew, of course, but he might have chosen not to tell her until after the guests had left.

“The priest,” I said, the idea occurring suddenly to me. “Would you like Father LeClerc to—to bless your mother’s body?” I thought it rather too late for Last Rites—assuming that Phaedre knew what those were—but I was sure that the priest would not mind offering any comfort he could. He had not left yet; I had seen him in the dining room only a few moments since, polishing off a platter of pork-chops garnished with fried eggs and gravy.

A slight tremor went through the shoulder under my hand. The still, beautiful face turned toward me, dark eyes opaque.

“What good will that do?” she whispered.

“Ah . . . well . . .” Flustered, I groped for a reply, but she had already turned away, staring at a stain in the wood of the table.

What I had done in the end was to give her a small dose of laudanum—an irony I resolutely ignored—and tell Teresa to put her to bed on the cot where she normally slept, in the dressing room off Jocasta’s boudoir.

I pushed open the door of the dressing room now, to see how she was. The small room was windowless and dark, smelling of starch and burnt hair and the faint flower fragrance of Jocasta’s toilet water. A huge armoire and its matching chiffonier stood at one side, a dressing table at the other. A folding screen marked off the far corner, and behind this was Phaedre’s narrow cot.

I could hear her breathing, slow and deep, and felt reassured by that. I moved quietly through the dark room, and pulled back the screen a little; she lay on her side, turned away, curled into a ball with her knees drawn up.

Bree had come into the dressing room behind me; she looked over my shoulder, her breath warm on my ear. I made a small gesture indicating that everything was all right, and pushed the screen back into place.

Just inside the door to the boudoir, Brianna paused. She turned to me suddenly, put her arms about me, and hugged me fiercely. In the lighted room beyond, Jemmy missed her and began to shriek.

“Mama! Ma! Ma-MA!”

I THOUGHT I ought to eat something, but with the smell of the attic and the scent of toilet water still lingering in the back of my sinuses, I had no appetite. A few guests still lingered in the dining room; particular friends of Jocasta’s, they would be staying on for a day or two. I nodded and smiled as I passed, but ignored the invitations to come and join them, instead heading for the stairs to the second floor.

The bedroom was empty, the mattresses stripped and the windows opened to air the room. The hearth had been swept and the room was cold, but blessedly quiet.

My own cloak still hung in the wardrobe. I lay down on the bare ticking, pulled the cloak over me, and fell instantly asleep.

I WOKE JUST BEFORE sunset, starving, with an oddly mixed sense of reassurance and unease. The reassurance I understood at once; the scent of blood and flowers had been replaced by one of shaving soap and body-warmed linen, and the pale gold light streaming through the window shone on the pillow beside me, where a long red-gold hair glinted in the hollow left by someone’s head. Jamie had come and slept beside me.

As though summoned by my thought, the door opened and he smiled in at me. Shaved, combed, freshly dressed, and clear-eyed, he seemed to have erased all traces of the night before—bar the expression on his face when he looked at me. Frowsy and ill-kempt as I was by contrast with his own neat appearance, the look of tenderness in his eyes warmed me, in spite of the lingering chill in the room.

“Awake at last. Did ye sleep well, Sassenach?”

“Like the dead,” I replied automatically, and felt a small internal lurch as I said it.

He saw it reflected on my face, and came swiftly to sit down on the bed beside me.

“What is it? Have ye had an evil dream, Sassenach?”

“Not exactly,” I said slowly. In fact, I had no memory of having dreamed at all. And yet, my mind appeared to have been ticking away in the shadows of unconsciousness, making notes and drawing its deductions. Prompted now by the word “dead,” it had just presented me with its conclusions, which accounted for the feeling of unease with which I had awoken.

“That woman Betty. Have they buried her yet?”

“No. They’ve washed the body and put it in a shed, but Jocasta wished to wait until the morning for the burial, so as not to trouble her guests. Some are staying on for another night.” He frowned slightly, watching me. “Why?”

I rubbed a hand over my face, less to rouse myself than to collect my words.

“There’s something wrong. About her death, I mean.”

“Wrong . . . how?” One eyebrow lifted. “It was a fearful way to die, to be sure, but that’s not what ye mean, is it?”

“No.” My hands were cold; I reached automatically for his, and he took them, engulfing my fingers with warmth. “I mean—I don’t believe it was a natural death. I think someone killed her.”

Blurted out that way, the words hung cold and stark in the air between us.

His brows drew together, and he pursed his lips slightly, thinking. I noticed, though, that he did not reject the idea out of hand, and that strengthened my conviction.

“Who?” he asked at last. “And are ye sure of it, Sassenach?”

“I have no idea. And I can’t be totally sure,” I admitted. “It’s only—” I hesitated, but he squeezed one of my hands lightly in encouragement. I shook my head. “I’ve been a nurse, a doctor, a healer, for a long time, Jamie. I’ve seen a dreadful number of people die, and from all sorts of things. I can’t quite put into words what it is here, but now that I’ve slept on it, I just know—I think—it’s wrong,” I ended, rather lamely.

The light was fading; shadows were coming down from the corners of the room, and I shivered suddenly, gripping his hands.

“I see,” he said softly. “But there’s no way ye can tell for sure, is there?”

The window was still half-open; the curtains billowed suddenly into the room with a gust of wind, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms with cold.

“There might be,” I said.

T
HE OUTBUILDING where they had put the body was well away from the house—a small toolshed outside the kitchen garden. The waning moon was low in the sky, but still shed light enough to see the brick path through the garden; the espaliered fruit trees spread black as spiderwebs against the walls. Someone had been digging; I could smell the cold damp of recently turned earth, and shivered involuntarily at the hint of worms and mold.

Jamie felt it, and put a light hand on my back.

“All right, Sassenach?” he whispered.

“Yes.” I gripped his free hand for reassurance. They would hardly be burying Betty in the kitchen garden; the digging must be for something prosaic, like an onion bed or a trench for early peas. The thought was comforting, though my skin still felt cold and thin, prickling with apprehensions.

Jamie himself was far from easy, though he was outwardly composed, as usual. He was no stranger to death, and had no great fear of it. But he was both Catholic and Celt, with a strong conviction of another, unseen world that lay past the dissolution of the body. He believed implicitly in
tannasgeach
—in spirits—and had no desire to meet one. Still, if I was determined, he would brave the otherworld for my sake; he squeezed my hand hard, and didn’t let go.

I squeezed back, deeply grateful for his presence. Beyond the debatable question of how Betty’s ghost might feel about my proposed plan of action, I knew that the notion of deliberate mutilation disturbed him deeply, however much his own intelligence might be convinced that a soulless body was no more than clay.

“To see men hacked to death on a battlefield is one thing,” he’d said earlier in the evening, still arguing with me. “That’s war, and it’s honorable, cruel as it may be. But to take a blade and carve up a poor innocent like yon woman in cold blood . . .” He looked at me, eyes dark with troubled thought. “Ye’re sure ye must do it, Claire?”

“Yes, I am,” I had said, eyes fixed on the contents of the bag I was assembling. A large roll of lint wadding, to soak up fluids, small jars for organ samples, my largest bone saw, a couple of scalpels, a wicked pair of heavy-bladed shears, a sharp knife borrowed from the kitchen . . . it was a sinister-looking collection, to be sure. I wrapped the shears in a towel to prevent them clanking against the other implements, and put them in the bag, carefully marshaling my words.

“Look,” I said at last, raising my eyes to meet his. “There’s something wrong, I know it. And if Betty was killed, then surely we owe it to her to find that out. If you were murdered, wouldn’t you want someone to do whatever they could to prove it? To—to avenge you?”

He stood still for a long moment, eyes narrowed in thought as he looked down at me. Then his face relaxed, and he nodded.

“Aye, I would,” he said quietly. He picked up the bone saw, and began wrapping it with cloth.

He hadn’t protested further. He hadn’t asked me again whether I was sure. He had merely said firmly that if I was going to do it, he was coming with me, and that was all about it.

As for being sure, I wasn’t. I did have an abiding feeling that something was very wrong about this death, but I was less confident in my sense of what it was, with the cold moon sinking through an empty sky and wind brushing my cheeks with the touch of icy fingers.

Betty might have died only by accident, not malice. I could be wrong; perhaps it was a simple hemorrhage of an esophageal ulcer, the bursting of an aneurysm in the throat, or some other physiological oddity. Unusual, but natural. Was I doing this, in fact, only to try to vindicate my faith in my own powers of diagnosis?

The wind belled my cloak and I pulled it tighter around me, one-handed, stiffening my spine. No. It wasn’t a natural death, I knew it. I couldn’t have said
how
I knew it, but fortunately Jamie hadn’t asked me that.

I had a brief flash of memory; Joe Abernathy, a jovial smile of challenge on his face, reaching into a cardboard box full of bones, saying, “I just want to see can you do it to a dead person, Lady Jane?”

I could; I had. He had handed me a skull, and the memory of Geillis Duncan shuddered through me like liquid ice.

“Ye needna do it, Claire.” Jamie’s hand tightened on mine. “I willna think ye a coward.” His voice was soft and serious, barely audible above the wind.

“I would,” I said, and felt him nod. That was the matter settled, then; he let go of my hand and went ahead of me, to open the gate.

He paused, and my dark-adapted eyes caught the clean sharp line of his profile as he turned his head, listening. The dark-lantern he carried smelled hot and oily, and a faint gleam escaping from its pierced-work panel sprinkled the cloth of his cloak with tiny flecks of dim light.

I glanced round myself, and looked back at the house. Late as it was, candles still burned in the back parlor, where the card games lingered on; I caught a faint murmur of voices as the wind changed, and a sudden laugh. The upper floors were mostly dark—save one window which I recognized as Jocasta’s.

“Your aunt’s awake late,” I whispered to Jamie. He turned and looked up at the house.

“Nay, it’s Duncan,” he said softly. “My aunt doesna need the light, after all.”

“Perhaps he’s reading to her in bed,” I suggested, trying to leaven the solemnity of our errand. A small derisive huff came from Jamie, but the oppressive atmosphere did lift just a bit. He unlatched the gate and pushed it open, showing a square of utter black beyond. I turned my back on the friendly lights of the house and stepped through, feeling just a bit like Persephone entering the Underworld.

Jamie swung the gate to, and handed me the lantern.

“What are you doing?” I whispered, hearing the rustle of his clothing. It was so dark by the gate that I couldn’t see him as more than a dark blur, but the faint sound that came next told me what he was doing.

“Pissing on the gateposts,” he whispered back, stepping back and rustling further as he did up his breeks. “If we must, then we will, but I dinna want anything to be following us back to the house.”

I made my own small huffing noise at that, but made no demur when he insisted upon repeating this ritual at the door to the shed. Imagination or not, the night seemed somehow inhabited, as though invisible things moved through the darkness, murmuring under the voice of the wind.

It was almost a relief to go inside, where the air was still, even though the scents of death mingled thickly with the dankness of rust, rotted straw, and mildewed wood. There was a faint rasp of metal as the dark-lantern’s panel slid back, and a dazzling shaft of light fell over the confines of the shed.

They had laid the dead slave on a board across two trestles, already washed and properly laid out, wrapped in a rough muslin shroud. Beside her stood a small loaf of bread and a cup of brandy. A small posy of dried herbs, carefully twisted into a knot, lay on the shroud, just above the heart. Who had left those? I wondered. One of the other slaves, surely. Jamie crossed himself at the sight, and looked at me, almost accusingly.