A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [571]
“The girl,” I said. “You mean your daughter? Malva?”
He shook his head a little, and his eyes took on a darker hue. “No daughter of mine,” he said.
“Not—not yours? But—her eyes. She had your eyes.” I heard myself say it, and could have bitten my tongue. He only smiled, though, grimly.
“And my brother’s.” He turned to the rail, put his hands on it, and looked across the stretch of sea, toward land. “Edgar was his name. When the Rising came, and I declared for the Stuarts, he would have none of it, saying ’twas folly. He begged me not to go.” He shook his head slowly, seeing something in memory, that I knew was not the wooded shore.
“I thought—well, it doesna matter what I thought, but I went. And asked him, would he mind my wife, and the wee lad.” He drew a deep breath, let it slowly out. “And he did.”
“I see,” I said very quietly. He turned his head sharply at the tone of my voice, gray eyes piercing.
“It was not his fault! Mona was a witch—an enchantress.” His lips compressed at the expression on my face. “Ye don’t believe me, I see. It is the truth; more than once, I caught her at it—working her charms, observing times—I came once to the roof o’ the house at midnight, searching for her. I saw her there, stark naked and staring at the stars, standing in the center of a pentacle she’d drawn wi’ the blood of a strangled dove, and her hair flying loose, mad in the wind.”
“Her hair,” I said, looking for some thread to grasp in this, and suddenly realizing. “She had hair like mine, didn’t she?”
He nodded, looking away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.
“She was . . . what she was,” he said softly. “I tried to save her—by prayer, by love. I could not.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, keeping my voice as low as his. With the wind as it was, there was little chance of our being overheard here, but this was not the sort of thing I thought anyone should hear.
He sighed, and swallowed again.
“She was hangit,” he said, sounding almost matter-of-fact about it. “For the murder of my brother.”
This, it seemed, had happened while Tom was imprisoned at Ardsmuir; she had sent him word, before her execution, telling him of Malva’s birth, and that she was confiding care of the children to Edgar’s wife.
“I suppose she thought that funny,” he said, sounding abstracted. “She’d the oddest sense of humor, Mona had.”
I felt cold, beyond the chill of the early-morning breeze, and hugged my elbows.
“But you got them back—Allan and Malva.”
He nodded; he had been transported, but had the good fortune to have his indenture bought by a kind and wealthy man, who had given him the money for the children’s passage to the Colonies. But then both his employer and the wife he had taken here had died in an epidemic of the yellow fever, and casting about for some new opportunity, he had heard of Jamie Fraser’s settling in North Carolina and that he would help those men he had known in Ardsmuir to land of their own.
“I would to God I had cut my own throat before I came,” he said, turning back abruptly to me. “Believe me in that.”
He seemed entirely sincere. I didn’t know what to say in response, but he seemed to require none, and went on.
“The girl . . . she was nay more than five years old when I first saw her, but already she had it—the same slyness, the charm—the same darkness of soul.”
He had tried to the best of his ability to save Malva, as well—to beat the wickedness out of her, to constrain the streak of wildness, above all, to keep her from working her wiles upon men.
“Her mither had that, too.” His lips tightened at the thought. “Any man. It was the curse of Lilith that they had, the both of them.”
I felt a hollowness in the pit of my stomach, as he came back now to the matter of Malva.
“But she was with child . . .” I said.
His face paled further, but his voice was firm.
“Aye, she was. I do not think it wrong to prevent yet another witch from entering the world.”
Seeing my