Voyager (133 page)

“I’d suppose so,” I said, “though not having tried the latter, I couldn’t say for sure.”

Geillis choked in her tea, spraying brown droplets over the front of her dress. She mopped at them carelessly, eyeing me with amusement.

“Well, I’ve not done it either, but I’ve seen them burn, poppet. And I think perhaps even lyin’ in a muddy hole watching your belly grow is better than that.”

“They kept you in the thieves’ hole all the time?” The silver spoon was cool in my hand, but my palm grew sweaty at the memory of the thieves’ hole in Cranesmuir. I had spent three days there with Geillis Duncan, accused as a witch. How long had she stayed there?

“Three months,” she said, staring meditatively into her tea. “Three mortal months of frozen feet and crawling vermin, stinking scraps of food and the grave-smell clinging to my skin day and night.”

She looked up then, mouth twisting in bitter amusement. “But I bore the child in style, at the end. When my pains began, they took me from the hole—little chance I’d run then, aye?—and the babe was born in my own old bedroom; in the fiscal’s house.”

Her eyes were slightly clouded, and I wondered whether the liquid in her glass was entirely tea.

“I had diamond-paned windows, do ye recall? All in shades of purple and green and white—the finest house in the village.” She smiled reminiscently. “They gave me the bairn to hold, and the green light fell over his face. He looked as though he was drowned indeed. I thought he should be cold to the touch, like a corpse, but he wasn’t; he was warm. Warm as his father’s balls.” She laughed suddenly, an ugly sound.

“Why are men such fools? Ye can lead them anywhere by the cock—for a while. Then give them a son and ye have them by the balls again. But it’s all ye are to them, whether they’re coming in or going out—a cunt.”

She was leaning back in her chair. At this, she spread her thighs wide, and hoisted her glass in ironic toast above her pubic bone, squinting down across the swelling bulge of belly.

“Well, here’s to it, I say! Most powerful thing in the world. The niggers know that, at least.” She took a deep, careless swig of her drink. “They carve wee idols, all belly and cunt and breasts. Same as men do where we came from—you and I.” She squinted at me, teeth bared in amusement. “Seen the dirty mags men buy under the counters then, aye?”

The bloodshot green eyes swiveled to Jamie. “And you’ll know the pictures and the books the men pass about among themselves in Paris now, won’t ye, fox? It’s all the same.” She waved a hand and drank again, deeply. “The only difference is the niggers have the decency to worship it.”

“Verra perceptive of them,” Jamie said calmly. He was sitting back in his chair, long legs stretched out in apparent relaxation, but I could see the tension in the fingers of the hand that gripped his own cup. “And how d’ye ken the pictures men look at in Paris, Mistress—Abernathy, is it now?”

She might be tipsy, but was by no means fuddled. She looked up sharply at the tone of his voice, and gave him a twisted smile.

“Oh, Mistress Abernathy will do well enough. When I lived in Paris, I had another name—Madame Melisande Robicheaux. Like that one? I thought it a bit grand, but your uncle Dougal gave it me, so I kept it—out of sentiment.”

My free hand curled into a fist, out of sight in the folds of my skirt. I had heard of Madame Melisande, when we lived in Paris. Not a part of society, she had had some fame as a seer of the future; ladies of the court consulted her in deepest secrecy, for advice on their love lives, their investments, and their pregnancies.

“I imagine you could have told the ladies some interesting things,” I said dryly.

Her laugh this time was truly amused. “Oh, I could, indeed! Seldom did, though. Folk don’t usually pay for the truth, ye know. Sometimes, though—did ye ken that Jean-Paul Marat’s mother meant to name her bairn Rudolphe? I told her I thought Rudolphe was ill-omened. I wondered now and then about that—would he grow up a revolutionary with a name like Rudolphe, or would he take it all out in writing poems, instead? Ever think that, fox—that a name might make a difference?” Her eyes were fixed on Jamie, green glass.

“Often,” he said, and set down his cup. “It was Dougal got ye away from Cranesmuir, then?”

She nodded, stifling a small belch. “Aye. He came to take the babe—alone, for fear someone would find out he was the father, aye? I wouldna let it go, though. And when he came near to wrest it from me—why, I snatched the dirk from his belt and pressed it to the child’s throat.” A small smile of satisfaction at the memory curved her lovely lips.

“Told him I’d kill it, sure, unless he swore on his brother’s life and his own soul to get me safe away.”

“And he believed you?” I felt mildly ill at the thought of any mother holding a knife to the throat of her newborn child, even in pretense.

Her gaze swiveled back to me. “Oh, yes,” she said softly, and the smile widened. “He knew me, did Dougal.”

Sweating, even in the chill of December, and unable to take his eyes off the tiny face of his sleeping son, Dougal had agreed.

“When he leaned over me to take the child, I thought of plunging the dirk into his own throat instead,” she said, reminiscently. “But it would have been a good deal harder to get away by myself, so I didn’t.”

Jamie’s expression didn’t change, but he picked up his tea and took a deep swallow.

Dougal had summoned the locksman, John MacRae, and the church sexton, and by means of discreet bribery, insured that the hooded figure dragged on a hurdle to the pitch barrel next morning would not be that of Geillis Duncan.

“I thought they’d use straw, maybe,” she said, “but he was a cleverer man than that. Auld Grannie Joan MacKenzie had died three days before, and was meant to be burying that same afternoon. A few rocks in the coffin and the lid nailed down tight, and Bob’s your uncle, eh? A real body, fine for burning.” She laughed, and gulped the last swallow of her drink.

“Not everyone’s seen their own funeral; fewer still ha’ seen their own execution, aye?”

It had been the dead of winter, and the small grove of rowan trees outside the village stood bare, drifted with their own dead leaves, the dried red berries showing here and there on the ground like spots of blood.

It was a cloudy day, with the promise of sleet or snow, but the whole village turned out nonetheless; a witch-burning was not an event to be missed. The village priest, Father Bain, had died himself three months before, of fever brought on by a festering sore, but a new priest had been imported for the occasion from a village nearby. Perfuming his way with a censer held before him, the priest had come down the path to the grove, chanting the service for the dead. Behind him came the locksman and his two assistants, dragging the hurdle and its black-robed burden.

“I expect Grannie Joan would have been pleased,” Geilie said, white teeth gleaming at the vision. “She couldna have expected more nor four or five people to her burying—as it was, she had the whole village, and the incense and special prayers to boot!”

MacRae had untied the body and carried it, lolling, to the barrel of pitch ready waiting.

“The court granted me the mercy to be weirrit before the burning,” Geillis explained ironically. “So they expected the body to be dead—no difficulty there, if I was strangled already. The only thing anyone might ha’ seen was that Grannie Joan weighed half what I did, newly delivered as I was, but no one seemed to notice she was light in MacRae’s arms.”

“You were there?” I said.

She nodded smugly. “Oh, aye. Well muffled in a cloak—everyone was, because o’ the weather—but I wouldna have missed it.”

As the priest finished his last prayer against the evils of enchantment, MacRae had taken the pine torch from his assistant and stepped forward.

“God, omit not this woman from Thy covenant, and the many evils that she in the body committed,” he had said, and flung the fire into the pitch.

“It was faster than I thought it would be,” Geillis said, sounding mildly surprised. “A great whoosh! of fire—there was a blast of hot air and a cheer from the crowd, and naught to be seen but the flames, shooting up high enough to singe the rowan branches overhead.”

The fire had subsided within a minute, though, and the dark figure within was clear enough to be seen through the pale daylight flames. The hood and the hair had burned away with the first scorching rush, and the face itself was burned beyond recognition. A few moments more, and the clean dark shapes of the bones emerged from the melted flesh, an airy superstructure rising above the charring barrel.

“Only great empty holes where her eyes had been,” she said. The moss-green eyes turned toward me, clouded by memory. “I thought perhaps she was looking at me. But then the skull exploded, and it was all over, and folk began to come away—all except a few who stayed in hopes of picking up a bit of bone as a keepsake.”

She rose and went unsteadily to the small table near the window. She picked up the silver bell and rang it, hard.

“Aye,” she said, her back turned to us. “Childbirth is maybe easier.”

“So Dougal got ye away to France,” Jamie said. The fingers of his right hand twitched slightly. “How came ye here to the West Indies?”

“Oh, that was later,” she said carelessly. “After Culloden.” She turned then, and smiled from Jamie to me.

“And what might bring the two of ye here to this place? Surely not the pleasure of my company?”

I glanced at Jamie, seeing the slight tensing of his back as he sat up straighter. His face stayed calm, though, only his eyes bright with wariness.

“We’ve come to seek a young kinsman of mine,” he said. “My nephew, Ian Murray. We’ve some reason to think he is indentured here.”

Geilie’s pale brows rose high, making soft ridges in her forehead.

“Ian Murray?” she said, and shook her head in puzzlement. “I’ve no indentured whites at all, here. No whites, come to that. The only free man on the place is the overseer, and he’s what they call a griffone; one-quarter black.”

Unlike me, Geillis Duncan was a very good liar. Impossible to tell, from her expression of mild interest, whether she had ever heard the name Ian Murray before. But lying she was, and I knew it.

Jamie knew it, too; the expression that flashed through his eyes was not disappointment, but fury, quickly suppressed.

“Indeed?” he said politely. “And are ye not fearful, then, alone wi’ your slaves here, so far from town?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.”

She smiled broadly at him, then lifted her double chin and waggled it gently in the direction of the terrace behind him. I turned my head, and saw that the French door was filled from jamb to doorpost with an immense black man, several inches taller than Jamie, from whose rolled-up shirt sleeves protruded arms like tree trunks, knotted with muscle.

“Meet Hercules,” Geilie said, with a tiny laugh. “He has a twin brother, too.”

“Named Atlas, by chance?” I asked, with an edge to my voice.

“You guessed! Is she no the clever one, eh, fox?” She winked conspiratorially at Jamie, the rounded flesh of her cheek wobbling with the movement. The light caught her from the side as she turned her head, and I saw the red spiderwebs of tiny broken capillaries that netted her jowls.

Hercule took no note of this, or of anything else. His broad face was slack and dull, and there was no life in the deep-sunk eyes beneath the bony brow ridge. It gave me a very uneasy feeling to look at him, and not only because of his threatening size; looking at him was like passing by a haunted house, where something lurks behind blind windows.

“That will do, Hercule; ye can go back to work now.” Geilie picked up the silver bell and tinkled it gently, once. Without a word, the giant turned and lumbered off the veranda. “I have no fear o’ the slaves,” she explained. “They’re afraid o’ me, for they think I’m a witch. Verra funny, considering, is it not?” Her eyes twinkled behind little pouches of fat.

“Geilie—that man.” I hesitated, feeling ridiculous in asking such a question. “He’s not a—a zombie?”

She laughed delightedly at that, clapping her hands together.

“Christ, a zombie? Jesus, Claire!” She chortled with glee, a bright pink rising from throat to hair roots.

“Well, I’ll tell ye, he’s no verra bright,” she said at last, still gasping and wheezing. “But he’s no dead, either!” and went off into further gales of laughter.

Jamie stared at me, puzzled.

“Zombie?”

“Never mind,” I said, my face nearly as pink as Geilie’s. “How many slaves have you got here?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

“Hee hee,” she said, winding down into giggles. “Oh, a hundred or so. It’s no such a big place. Only three hundred acres in cane, and a wee bit of coffee on the upper slopes.”

She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket and patted her damp face, sniffing a bit as she regained her composure. I could feel, rather than see, Jamie’s tension. I was sure he was as convinced as I that Geilie knew something about Ian Murray—if nothing else, she had betrayed no surprise whatever at our appearance. Someone had told her about us, and that someone could only be Ian.

The thought of threatening a woman to extract information wasn’t one that would come naturally to Jamie, but it would to me. Unfortunately, the presence of the twin pillars of Hercules had put a stop to that line of thought. The next best idea seemed to be to search the house and grounds for any trace of the boy. Three hundred acres was a fair piece of ground, but if he was on the property, he would likely be in or near the buildings—the house, the sugar refinery, or the slave quarters.

I came out of my thoughts to realize that Geilie had asked me a question.

“What’s that?”

“I said,” she repeated patiently, “that ye had a great deal of talent for the healing when I knew ye in Scotland; you’ll maybe know more now?”

“I expect I might.” I looked her over cautiously. Did she want my skill for herself? She wasn’t healthy; a glance at her mottled complexion and the dark circles beneath her eyes was enough to show that. But was she actively ill?

“Not for me,” she said, seeing my look. “Not just now, anyway. I’ve two slaves gone sick. Maybe ye’d be so kind as to look at them?”