The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [220]
“No.” She was silent for a moment, and I felt rather than saw her tilt back her head, looking up at the stars and the peaceful moon.
“I . . . have never been to Brownsville,” she added, almost shyly.
Or anywhere else, it seemed. She told the story hesitantly, but almost eagerly, with no more than slight prodding on my part.
Beardsley had—in essence—bought her from her father, and brought her, with other goods acquired in Baltimore, down to his house, where he had essentially kept her prisoner, forbidding her to leave the homestead, or to show herself to anyone who might come to the house. Left to do the work of the homestead while Beardsley traveled into the Cherokee lands with his trade goods, she had had no society but a bond lad—who was little company, being deaf and speechless.
“Really,” I said. In the events of the day, I had quite forgotten Josiah and his twin. I wondered whether she had known both of them, or only Keziah.
“How long is it since you came to North Carolina?” I asked.
“Two yearth,” she said softly. “Two yearth, three month, and five dayth.” I remembered the marks on the doorpost, and wondered when she had begun to keep count. From the very beginning? I stretched my back, disturbing Hiram, who grumbled.
“I see. By the way, what is your Christian name?” I asked, belatedly aware that I had no idea.
“Frantheth,” she said, then tried again, not liking the mumbled sound of it. “Fran-cess,” the end of it a hiss through her broken teeth. She gave a shrug, then, and laughed—a small, shy sound. “Fanny,” she said. “My mother called me Fanny.”
“Fanny,” I said, encouragingly. “That’s a very nice name. May I call you so?”
“I . . . would be pleathed,” she said. She drew breath again, but stopped without speaking, evidently too shy to say whatever she’d had in mind. With her husband dead, she seemed entirely passive, quite deprived of the force that had animated her earlier.
“Oh,” I said, belatedly realizing. “Claire. Do call me Claire, please.”
“Claire—how pretty.”
“Well, it hasn’t any esses, at least,” I said, not thinking. “Oh—I do beg your pardon!”
She made a small pff sound of dismissal. Encouraged by the dark, the faint sense of intimacy engendered by the exchange of names—or simply from a need to talk, after so long—she told me about her mother, who had died when she was twelve, her father, a crabber, and her life in Baltimore, wading out along the shore at low tide to rake oysters and gather mussels, watching the fishing craft and the warships come in past Fort Howard to sail up the Patapsco.
“It wath . . . peatheful,” she said, rather wistfully. “It wath tho open—nothing but the thky and the water.” She tilted back her head again, as though yearning for the small bit of night sky visible through the interlacing branches overhead. I supposed that while the forested mountains of North Carolina were refuge and embrace to a Highlander like Jamie, they might well seem claustrophobic and alien to someone accustomed to the watery Chesapeake shore.
“Will you go back there, do you think?” I asked.
“Back?” She sounded slightly startled. “Oh. I . . . I hadn’t thought . . .”
“No?” I had found a tree trunk to lean against, and stretched slightly, to ease my back. “You must have seen that your—that Mr. Beardsley was dying. Didn’t you have some plan?” Beyond the fun of torturing him slowly to death, that is. It occurred to me that I had been getting altogether too comfortable with this woman, alone in the dark with the goats. She might truly have been Beardsley’s victim—or she might only be saying so now, to enlist our aid. It would behoove me to remember the burned toes on Beardsley’s foot, and the appalling state of that loft. I straightened up a little, and felt for the small knife I carried at my belt—just in case.
“No.” She sounded a little dazed—and no wonder, I supposed. I felt more than a little dazed myself, simply from emotion and fatigue. Enough so that I almost missed what she said next.
“What did you say?”
“I thaid . . . Mary Ann didn’t tell me what I wath to do . . . after.”
“Mary Ann,