A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [578]
Jem was hanging round, too, bored and poking his fingers into everything. He was singing to himself, half under his breath; she paid no attention, until she happened to catch a few words.
“What did you say?” she asked, rounding on him incredulously. He couldn’t have been singing “Folsom Prison Blues”—could he?
He blinked at her, lowered his chin to his chest, and said—in the deepest voice he could produce—“Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”
She narrowly stopped herself laughing out loud, feeling her cheeks go pink with the effort of containment.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well. There was only one place he could have gotten it, and her heart rose up at the thought.
“Daddy,” he said logically.
“Has Daddy been singing?” she asked, trying to sound casual. He had to have been. And, just as obviously, had to have been trying Claire’s advice, to shift the register of his voice so as to loosen his frozen vocal cords.
“Uh-huh. Daddy sings a lot. He teached me the song about Sunday morning, and the one about Tom Dooley, and . . . and lots,” he ended, rather at a loss.
“Did he? Well, that’s—put that down!” she said, as he idly picked up an open pouch of rose madder.
“Oops.” He looked guiltily at the blob of paint that had erupted from the leather pouch and landed on his shirt, then at her, and made a tentative move toward the door.
“Oops, he says,” she said darkly. “Don’t you move!” Snaking out a hand, she grabbed him by the collar and applied a turpentine-soaked rag vigorously to the front of his shirt, succeeding only in producing a large pink blotch rather than a vivid red line.
Jem was silent during this ordeal, head bobbing as she pulled him to and fro, swabbing.
“What are you doing in here, anyway?” she demanded crossly. “Didn’t I tell you to go find something to do?” There was no shortage of things to do at River Run, after all.
He hung his head and muttered something, in which she made out the word “scared.”
“Scared? Of what?” A little more gently, she pulled the shirt off over his head.
“The ghost.”
“What ghost?” she asked warily, not sure yet how to handle this. She was aware that all of the slaves at River Run believed implicitly in ghosts, simply as a fact of life. So did virtually all of the Scottish settlers in Cross Creek, Campbelton, and the Ridge. And the Germans from Salem and Bethania. So, for that matter, did her own father.
She could not simply inform Jem that there was no such thing as a ghost—particularly as she was not entirely convinced of that herself.
“Maighistear àrsaidh’s ghost,” he said, looking up at her for the first time, his dark blue eyes troubled. “Josh says he’s been walkin’.”
Something skittered down her back like a centipede. Maighistear àrsaidh was Old Master—Hector Cameron. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the window. They were in the small room above the stable block where she did the messier bits of paint preparation, and Hector Cameron’s white marble mausoleum was clearly visible from here, gleaming like a tooth at the side of the lawn below.
“What makes Josh say that, I wonder?” she said, stalling for time. Her first impulse was to observe that ghosts didn’t walk in broad daylight—but the obvious corollary to that was that they did walk by night, and the last thing she wanted to do was give Jem nightmares.
“He says Angelina saw him, night before last. A big ol’ ghost,” he said, stretching up, hands clawed, and widening his eyes in obvious imitation of Josh’s account.
“Yeah? What was he doing?” She kept her tone light, only mildly interested, and it seemed to be working; Jem was more interested than scared, for the moment.
“Walkin’,” Jem said with a small shrug. What else did ghosts do, after all?
“Was he smoking a pipe?” She’d caught sight of a tall gentleman strolling under the trees on the lawn below, and had an idea.
Jem looked somewhat taken aback at the notion of a pipe-smoking ghost.
“I dunno,” he said dubiously. “Do ghosts smoke pipes?”
“I sort of doubt it,” she