Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [173]
With the house standing vacant, he might never have got the job finished. But with the impetus of Fiona behind, and the lure of Brianna before … he smiled at the thought of the two of them: little dark, curly-headed wren, and tall fire-haired Viking. Likely it took women to get men to do anything much.
Time to finish up, though.
With a sense of somber ceremony, he unpinned the corners of the yellowed sheet of paper and took it down from the cork. It was his family tree, a genealogical chart made out in the Reverend’s neat round hand.
MacKenzies and more MacKenzies, generations of them. He’d thought lately of taking back the name permanently, not just for the singing. After all, with Dad gone he didn’t mean to come back much more to Inverness, where folk would know him as Wakefield. That had been the point of the genealogy, after all; that Roger shouldn’t forget who he was.
Dad had known a few individual stories, but no more than the names for most of the people on the list. And he hadn’t known even that, for the most important one—the woman whose green eyes Roger saw each morning in the mirror. She was nowhere on this list, for good reason.
Roger’s finger stopped near the top of the chart. There he was, the changeling—William Buccleigh MacKenzie. Given to foster parents to raise, the illegitimate offspring of the war chieftain of clan MacKenzie, and of a witch condemned to burning. Dougal MacKenzie and the witch Geillis Duncan.
Not a witch at all, of course, but something just as dangerous. He had her eyes—or so Claire said. Had he inherited something more from her as well? Was the terrifying ability to travel through the stones passed down unsuspected through generations of respectable boatwrights and herdsmen?
He thought of it each time he saw the chart now—and for that reason, tried not to look. He appreciated Brianna’s ambivalence; he understood all too well the razor’s edge between fear and curiosity, the pull between the need to know and the fear of finding out.
Well, he could help Brianna find out. And for himself …
Roger slipped the chart into a folder, and put it in the box. He closed the top of the carton, and added an “X” of sticky tape across the flap for good measure.
“That’s that, then,” he said aloud, and left the empty room.
He stopped at the head of the stairs, taken by surprise.
Brianna had been bathing, braving the ancient geyser with its cracked enamel and rumbling flame. Now she stepped into the hall, wearing nothing but a towel.
She turned down the hall, not seeing him. Roger stood very still, listening to the thud of his heart, feeling his palm slick on the polished banister.
She was modestly covered; he had seen more of her in the halters and shorts she had worn in the summer. It was the fragility of her covering that roused him; the knowledge that he could undress her with one quick tug. That, and the knowledge that they were quite alone in the house.
Dynamite.
He took a step after her, and stopped. She had heard him; she stopped, too, but it was a long moment before she turned around. Her feet were bare, high-arched and long-toed; the slender curves of her wet footprints were dark on the worn runner that covered the floor of the hallway.
She didn’t say anything. Just looked at him straight-on, her eyes dark and slanting. She stood against the tall window at the end of the hall, her swaddled figure black against the pale gray light of the rainy day outside.
If he should touch her, he knew how she would feel. Her skin would be still hot from the bath, damp in the crevices of knee and thigh and elbow. He could smell her, the minglings of shampoo and soap and powder, the smell of her flesh masked by the ghosts of flowers.
Her footprints on the runner stretched before him, a fragile chain of footsteps linking them. He kicked off his sandals and planted a bare foot on one of the prints she had left; it was cool on his skin.
There were drops of water on her shoulders, matching the droplets on the windowpane behind her, as though she had stepped through it out of the rain. She lifted