Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [2]
Chapter 25 - Enter a Serpent
Chapter 26 - Plague and Pestilence
Chapter 27 - Trout Fishing in America
Chapter 28 - Heated Conversation
Chapter 29 - Charnel Houses
Part Eight - Beaucoup
Chapter 30 - Into Thin Air
Chapter 31 - Return to Inverness
Chapter 32 - Grimoire
Chapter 33 - Midsummer’s Eve
Chapter 34 - Lallybroch
Chapter 35 - Bon Voyage
Chapter 36 - You can’t Go Home Again
Chapter 37 - Gloriana
Chapter 38 - For Those in Peril on the Sea
Chapter 39 - A Gambling Man
Part Nine - Passionnément
Chapter 40 - Virgin Sacrifice
Chapter 41 - Journey’s End
Part Ten - Impaired Relations
Chapter 42 - Moonlight
Chapter 43 - Whisky in the Jar
Chapter 44 - Three-Cornered Conversation
Chapter 45 - Fifty-Fifty
Chapter 46 - Comes a Stranger
Chapter 47 - A Father’s Song
Chapter 48 - Away in a Manger
Chapter 49 - Choices
Chapter 50 - In Which All is Revealed
Part Eleven - Pas du Tout
Chapter 51 - Betrayal
Chapter 52 - Desertion
Chapter 53 - Blame
Chapter 54 - Captivity I
Chapter 55 - Captivity II
Chapter 56 - Confessions of the Flesh
Chapter 57 - A Shattered Smile
Chapter 58 - Lord John Returns
Chapter 59 - Blackmail
Chapter 60 - Trial by Fire
Chapter 61 - The Office of a Priest
Chapter 62 - Three-Thirds of a Ghost
Part Twelve - Je T’Aime
Chapter 63 - Forgiveness
Chapter 64 - Bottom of the Ninth
Chapter 65 - Return to Fraser’s Ridge
Chapter 66 - Child of My Blood
Chapter 67 - The Toss of a Coin
Chapter 68 - Domestic Bliss
Chapter 69 - Jeremiah
Chapter 70 - The Gathering
Chapter 71 - Circle’s Close
PROLOGUE
I’ve never been afraid of ghosts. I live with them daily, after all. When I look in a mirror, my mother’s eyes look back at me; my mouth curls with the smile that lured my great-grandfather to the fate that was me.
No, how should I fear the touch of those vanished hands, laid on me in love unknowing? How could I be afraid of those that molded my flesh, leaving their remnants to live long past the grave?
Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words.
Of course it isn’t these homely and accustomed ghosts that trouble sleep and curdle wakefulness. Look back, hold a torch to light the recesses of the dark. Listen to the footsteps that echo behind, when you walk alone.
All the time the ghosts flit past and through us, hiding in the future. We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway. By blood and by choice, we make our ghosts; we haunt ourselves.
Each ghost comes unbidden from the misty grounds of dream and silence.
Our rational minds say, “No, it isn’t.”
But another part, an older part, echoes always softly in the dark, “Yes, but it could be.”
We come and go from mystery and, in between, we try to forget. But a breeze passing in a still room stirs my hair now and then in soft affection. I think it is my mother.
PART ONE
O Brave New World
1
A HANGING IN EDEN
Charleston, June 1767
I heard the drums long before they came in sight. The beating echoed in the pit of my stomach, as though I too were hollow. The sound traveled through the crowd, a harsh military rhythm meant to be heard over speech or gunfire. I saw heads turn as the people fell silent, looking up the stretch of East Bay Street, where it ran from the half-built skeleton of the new Customs House toward White Point Gardens.
It was a hot day, even for Charleston in June. The best places were on the seawall, where the air moved; here below, it was like being roasted alive. My shift was soaked through, and the cotton bodice clung between my breasts. I wiped my face for the tenth time in as many minutes and lifted the heavy coil of my hair, hoping vainly for a cooling breeze upon my neck.
I was morbidly aware of necks at the moment. Unobtrusively, I put my hand up