A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [334]
“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
THE 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