A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [572]
“Ye ken she tried to kill ye? You and me, both.”
“What do you mean? Tried to kill me, how?”
“When ye told her about the invisible things, the—the germs. She took great interest in that. She told me, when I caught her wi’ the bones.”
“What bones?” I asked, a sliver of ice running down my back.
“The bones she took from Ephraim’s grave, to work her charms upon your husband. She didna use them all, and I found them in her workbasket later. I beat her, badly, and she told me then.”
Accustomed to wander alone in the woods in search of food plants and herbs, she had been doing so during the height of the dysentery epidemic. And in her wanderings, had come upon the isolated cabin of the sin-eater, that strange, damaged man. She had found him near death, burning with fever and sunk in coma, and while she stood there undecided whether to run for help, or only run, he had in fact died.
Whereupon, seized by inspiration—and bearing my careful teachings in mind—she had taken mucus and blood from the body and put it into a little bottle with a bit of broth from the kettle on the hearth, nurturing it inside her stays with the warmth of her own body.
And had slipped a few drops of this deadly infusion into my food, and that of her father, in the hope that if we fell sick, our deaths would be seen as no more than a part of the sickness that plagued the Ridge.
My lips felt stiff and bloodless.
“You’re sure of this?” I whispered. He nodded, making no effort to convince me, and that alone gave me conviction that he spoke the truth.
“She wanted—Jamie?” I asked.
He closed his eyes for a moment; the sun was coming up, and while the brilliance of it was behind us, the gleam off the water was bright as silver plate.
“She . . . wanted,” he said at last. “She lusted. Lusted for wealth, for position, for what she saw as freedom, not seeing it as license—never seeing!” He spoke with sudden violence, and I thought it was not Malva alone who had never seen things as he did.
But she had wanted Jamie, whether for himself or only for his property. And when her love charm failed, and the epidemic of sickness came, had taken a more direct way toward what she wanted. I could not yet find a way to grasp that—and yet I knew it was true.
And then, finding herself inconveniently with child, she had come up with a new scheme.
“Do you know who the father really was?” I asked, my throat tightening again—I thought it always would—at the memory of the sunlit garden and the two neat, small bodies, ruined and wasted. Such a waste.
He shook his head, but would not look at me, and I knew that he had some idea, at least. He would not tell me, though, and I supposed it didn’t matter just now. And the Governor would be up soon, ready to receive him.
He, too, heard the stirrings down below, and took a deep breath.
“I could not let her destroy so many lives; could not let her go on. For she was a witch, make no mistake; that she failed to kill either you or me was no more than luck. She would have killed someone, before she finished. Perhaps you, if your husband clung to you. Perhaps him, in the hope of inheriting his property for the child.” He took a ragged, painful breath.
“She was not born of my loins, and yet—she was my daughter, my blood. I could not . . . could not allow . . . I was responsible.” He stopped, unable to finish. In this, I thought, he told the truth. And yet . . .
“Thomas,” I said firmly, “this is twaddle, and you know it.”
He looked at me, surprised, and I saw that tears stood in his eyes. He blinked them back and answered fiercely.
“Say you so? You know nothing, nothing!”
He saw me flinch, and looked down. Then, awkwardly, he reached out and took my hand. I felt the scars of the surgery I had done, the flexible strength of his gripping fingers.
“I have waited all my life, in a search . . .” He waved his free hand vaguely, then closed his fingers, as though grasping the thought, and continued more surely, “No. In hope. In hope of a thing I could not name, but that I knew must exist.”
His