A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [329]
She closed her eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath, only then beginning to relax a little.
“Good. I must tell ye a thing, Nephew, and no one else must hear. Niece”—she lifted a long white hand toward me—“go and be seeing as we’re truly alone.”
I went obediently to look out into the hall. No one was visible, though there were voices coming from a room down the hall—laughter, and tremendous rustlings and thumpings, as young women chattered and rearranged their hair and clothing. I pulled my head back in and closed the door, and the sounds from the rest of the house receded at once, muffled into a distant rumble.
“What is it, then, Auntie?” Jamie was still holding her hand, one big thumb gently stroking the back of it, over and over, in the soothing rhythm I’d seen him use on skittish animals. It was less effective on his aunt than on the average horse or dog, though.
“It was him. He’s here!”
“Who’s here, Auntie?”
“I don’t know!” Her eyes rolled desperately to and fro, as though in a vain attempt to see through not only darkness, but walls, as well.
Jamie raised his brows at me, but he could see as well as I that she wasn’t raving, incoherent as she sounded. She realized what she sounded like; I could see the effort in her face as she pulled herself together.
“He’s come for the gold,” she said, lowering her voice. “The Frenchman’s gold.”
“Oh, aye?” Jamie said cautiously. He darted a glance at me, one eyebrow raised, but I shook my head. She wasn’t having hallucinations.
Jocasta sighed with impatience and shook her head, then stopped abruptly, with a muffled “Och!” of pain, putting both hands to her head as though to keep it on her shoulders.
She breathed deeply for a moment or two, her lips pressed tight together. Then she slowly lowered her hands.
“It started last night,” she said. “The pain in my eye.”
She’d waked in the night to a throbbing in her eye, a dull pain that spread slowly to the side of her head.
“It’s come before, ken,” she explained. She had pushed herself up to a sitting position now, and was beginning to look a little better, though she still held the warm cloth to her eye. “It began when I started to lose my sight. Sometimes it would be one eye, sometimes both. But I kent what was coming.”
But Jocasta MacKenzie Cameron Innes was not a woman to allow mere bodily indisposition to interfere with her plans, let alone interrupt what promised to be the most scintillating social affair in Cross Creek’s history.
“I was that disgusted,” she said. “And here Miss Flora MacDonald coming!”
But the arrangements had all been made; the barbecued carcasses were roasting in their pits, hogsheads of ale and beer stood ready by the stables, and the air was full of the fragrance of hot bread and beans from the cookhouse. The slaves were well-trained, and she had full faith that Ulysses would manage everything. All she must do, she’d thought, was to stay on her feet.
“I didna want to take opium or laudanum,” she explained. “Or I’d fall asleep for sure. So I made do wi’ the whisky.”
She was a tall woman, and thoroughly accustomed to an intake of liquor that would have felled a modern man. By the time the MacDonalds arrived, she’d had the better part of a bottle—but the pain was getting worse.
“And then my eye began to water so fierce, everyone would ha’ seen something was wrong, and I didna want that. So I came into my sitting room; I’d taken care to put a wee bottle of laudanum in my workbasket, in case the whisky should be not enough.
“Folk were swarming thick as lice outside, trying to catch a glimpse or a word with Miss MacDonald, but the sitting room was deserted, so far as I could tell, what wi’ my head pounding and my eye fit to explode.” She said this last quite casually, but I saw Jamie flinch, the memory of what I’d done with the needle obviously still fresh. He swallowed and wiped his knuckles hard across his mouth.
Jocasta had quickly abstracted the bottle of laudanum, swallowed a few gulps, and then sat for a moment, waiting for