A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [449]
The third portrait looked to have been done much more recently than the others, and showed the effects of Jocasta’s failing eyesight.
The edges were blurred, the colors muddy, shapes just slightly distorted, so that the elderly gentleman who looked out of the clouded oil seemed somehow disturbing, as though he belonged to some race not quite human, in spite of the orthodoxy of his wig and high white stock.
He wore a black coat and waistcoat, old-fashioned in style, with the folds of a tartan plaid draped over his shoulder, caught up with a brooch whose golden gleam was echoed by the ornamental knurl atop the dirk the old man held, his fingers bent and gnarled with arthritis. I recognized that dirk.
“So that is Hector Cameron.” Jamie recognized it, too. He looked at the painting with fascination.
Jocasta reached out a hand, touching the surface of the paint as though to identify it by touch.
“Aye, that’s him,” she said dryly. “Never saw him in life, did ye, Nephew?”
Jamie shook his head.
“Once perhaps—but I was nay more than a babe at the time.” His gaze traced the old man’s features with deep interest, as though looking for clues to Hector Cameron’s character. Such clues were evident; the man’s force of personality fairly vibrated from the canvas.
He had strong bones, the man in the portrait, though the flesh hung from them in the infirmity of age. The eyes were still sharp, but one was half-closed—it might have been only a drooping eyelid caused by a small stroke, but the impression was that of an habitual manner of looking at the world; one eye always narrowed in cynical appraisal.
Jocasta was searching through the contents of the chest, fingers darting lightly here and there, like hunting moths. She touched one box of miniatures, and lifted it with a small grunt of satisfaction.
She ran a finger slowly along the edge of each miniature, and I saw that the frames were patterned differently; squares and ovals, smooth gilded wood, tarnished silver laid in a rope border, another studded with tiny rosettes. She found one she recognized, and plucked it from the box, handing it absently to me as she went back to her search.
The miniature was also of Hector Cameron—but this portrait done many years before the other. Dark wavy hair lay loose on his shoulders, a small ornamental braid down one side sporting two grouse’s feathers, in the ancient Highland style. The same solid bones were there, but the flesh was firm; he had been handsome, Hector Cameron.
It was an habitual expression; whether by inclination or accident of birth, the right eye was narrowed here, as well, though not as much as in the older portrait.
My scrutiny was interrupted by Jocasta, who laid a hand on my arm.
“Is this the lass?” she asked, thrusting another of the miniatures at me.
I took it, puzzled, and gasped when I turned it over. It was Phaedre, done when the girl was in her early teens. Her usual cap was missing; she wore a simple kerchief bound over her hair that threw the bones of her face into bold relief. Hector Cameron’s bones.
Jocasta nudged the box of paintings with her foot.
“Give those to your daughter, Nephew. Tell her to paint them over—it would be shame to waste the canvas.” Without waiting for response, she set off back toward the house alone, hesitating only briefly at the fork in the path, steering by scent and memory.
THERE WAS A PROFOUND silence in the wake of Jocasta’s departure, broken only by the singing of a mockingbird in a nearby pine.
“I will be damned,” Jamie said at last, taking his eyes off the figure of his aunt as she vanished into the house, alone. He didn’t look shocked, so much as deeply bemused. “Did the girl know, d’ye think?”
“Almost certainly,” I said. “The slaves would surely have known; some must have been here when she was born; they’d have told her, if she wasn’t quick enough to have worked it out herself—and I certainly think she is.”
He nodded, and leaned back against the wall of the carriage house, looking meditatively down his long nose at the wicker chest of paintings. I felt a