Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [266]
“That’s as well,” he said dryly, “since we never caught him.”
“Oh, I’m glad.” I looked down at Ian, and moved my thumbs a quarter of an inch outward, pressing again. His face was still tight with pain, but I thought the whiteness at the corners of his mouth was lessening a bit.
“I … ah … don’t suppose you know who did kill Mrs. Alcott?” Lord John’s voice was casual. I glanced up at him, but his face betrayed nothing beyond simple curiosity and a large number of spots.
“I do, yes,” I said hesitantly, “but—”
“You do? A murder? Who was it? What happened, Auntie? Ooch!” Ian’s eyelids popped open under my fingers, wide with interest, then snapped shut in a grimace of pain as the firelight struck them.
“You be still,” I said, and dug my thumbs into the muscles in front of his ears. “You’re ill.”
“Argk!” he said, but subsided obediently into limpness, the corn-shuck mattress rustling loudly under his thin body. “All right, Auntie, but who? Ye canna be telling wee bits o’ things like that, and expect me to sleep without knowing the rest of it. Can she, then?” He opened one eye in a slitted appeal toward Lord John, who smiled in reply.
“I bear no further responsibility in the matter,” Lord John assured me. “However”—he spoke more firmly to Ian—“you might stop to think that perhaps the story incriminates someone your aunt prefers to shield. It would be discourteous to insist upon details, in that case.”
“Och, no, it’s never that,” Ian assured him, eyes tight closed. “Uncle Jamie wouldna murder anybody, save he had good reason.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Lord John jerk, slightly startled. Plainly, it had never occurred to him that it could have been Jamie.
“No,” I assured him, seeing the fair brows draw together. “It wasn’t.”
“Well, and it wasna me, either,” Ian said smugly. “And who else would Auntie be protecting?”
“You flatter yourself, Ian,” I said dryly. “But since you insist …”
My hesitancy had in fact been in the interests of protecting Young Ian. No one else could be harmed by the story—the murderer was dead and, for all I knew, Mr. Willoughby, too, perished in the hidden jungles of the Jamaican hills, though I sincerely hoped not.
But the story involved someone else, as well; the woman I had first known as Geillis Duncan and known later as Geillis Abernathy, at whose behest Ian had been kidnapped from Scotland, imprisoned on Jamaica, and had suffered things that he had only lately begun to tell us.
Still, there seemed no way out of it now—Ian was fractious as a child insisting on a bedtime story, and Lord John was sitting up in bed like a chipmunk waiting for nuts, eyes bright with interest.
And so, with the macabre urge to begin with “Once upon a time …” I leaned back against the wall, and with Ian’s head still in my lap, began the story of Rose Hall and its mistress, the witch Geillis Duncan; of the Reverend Archibald Campbell and his strange sister, Margaret, of the Edinburgh Fiend and the Fraser prophecy; and of a night of fire and crocodile’s blood, when the slaves of six plantations along the Yallahs River had risen and slain their masters, roused by the houngan Ishmael.
Of later events in the cave of Abandawe on Haiti, I said nothing. Ian, after all, had been there. And those happenings had nothing to do with the murder of Mina Alcott.
“A crocodile,” Ian murmured. His eyes were closed, and his face had grown more relaxed under my fingers, despite the gruesome nature of my story. “Ye really saw it, Auntie?”
“I not only saw it, I stepped on it,” I assured him. “Or rather, I stepped on it, and then I saw it. If I’d seen it first, I’d have bloody run the other way.”
There was a low laugh from the bed. Lord John scratched at his arm, smiling.
“You must find life here rather dull, Mrs. Fraser, after your adventures in the Indies.”
“I could do with a spot of dullness now and then,” I said, rather wistfully.
Involuntarily, I glanced at the bolted door, where I had propped Ian’s musket, brought back from the storehouse when