Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [300]
“That they’re not!” said Jenny, with a quick flash of temper. “They were my mother’s jewels, that my father gave to Jamie for his wife, and—”
“And his wife I am,” Laoghaire interrupted. She looked at Brianna then, a cold, gauging look.
“I am his wife,” she repeated. “I married him in good faith, and he promised me payment for the wrong he did me.” She turned her cold gaze on Jenny. “It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen a penny. Am I to sell my shoes to feed my daughter—the one he’s left to me?”
She lifted her chin and looked at Brianna.
“If you’re his daughter, then his debts are yours as well. Tell her, Hobart!”
Hobart looked mildly embarrassed.
“Ah, now, Sister,” he said, putting a hand on her arm in an attempt to be soothing. “I dinna think—”
“No, ye don’t, and haven’t since ye were born!” She shook him off in irritation, and stretched out a hand toward the pearls. “They’re mine!”
It was pure reflex; the pearls were clutched tight in Brianna’s hand before she had made the decision to snatch them. The gold roundels were cool against her skin, but the pearls were warm—the sign of a genuine pearl, her mother had told her.
“You wait just one minute here.” The strength and coldness of her own voice surprised her. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what happened between you and my father, but—”
“I am Laoghaire MacKenzie, and your bastard of a father married me four years ago—under false pretenses, I might add.” Laoghaire’s anger had not disappeared but seemed to have submerged; her face had a tight, stretched look, but she was not shouting, and the red had faded from her soft, plump cheeks.
Brianna took a deep breath, striving for calmness.
“Yes? But if my mother is with my father now—”
“He left me.”
The words were spoken without heat, but they fell with the weight of stones in still water, spreading endless ripples of pain and betrayal. Young Jamie had been opening his mouth to speak; he shut it again, watching Laoghaire.
“He said that he could not bear it longer—to dwell in the same house with me, to share my bed.” She spoke calmly, as though reciting a piece she had learned by heart, her eyes still fixed on the empty spot where the pearls had rested.
“So he left. And then he came back—with the witch. Flaunted her in my face; bedded her under my nose.” Slowly, she raised her eyes to Brianna’s, studying her with quiet intensity, searching out the mysteries of her face. Slowly, she nodded.
“It was she,” she said, with a certainty that was faintly eerie in its calmness. “She cast her spells on him from the day she came to Leoch—and on me. She made me invisible. From the day she came, he could not see me.”
Brianna felt a small shiver run up her spine, despite the hissing peat fire on the hearth.
“And then she was gone. Dead, they said. Killed in the Rising. And him come home again from England, free at long last.” She shook her head very slightly; her eyes still rested on Brianna’s face, but Brianna knew Laoghaire didn’t see her any longer.
“But she wasna dead at all,” Laoghaire said softly. “And he was not free. I knew that; I always knew that. Ye canna kill a witch with steel—they must burn.” Laoghaire’s pale blue eyes turned to Jenny.
“You saw her—at my wedding. Her fetch standing there, between me and him. Ye saw her, but ye didna say. I only heard it later, when ye told Maisri the seer. You should ha’ told me, then.” It was a not so much an accusation as a statement of fact.
Jenny’s face had gone pale again, the slanted blue eyes dark with something—perhaps fear. She licked her lips and started to reply, but Laoghaire’s attention had shifted to Ian.
“Ye’d best be wary, Ian Murray,” she said, her tone now matter-of-fact. She nodded toward Brianna. “Look at her weel, man. Is a right woman made so? Taller than most men, dressed as a man, wi’ hands as broad as a dinner plate, fit to choke the life from one o’ your weans, should she choose.”
Ian didn’t answer, though his long, homely face looked