The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [221]
She laughed, and the hair on my neck rippled unpleasantly.
“Oh, no. Mary Ann wath the fourth one.”
“The . . . fourth one,” I said, a little faintly.
“Thye’th the only one he buried under the rowan tree,” she informed me. “That wath a mithtake. The otherth are in the woodth. He got lazy, I think; he did not want to walk tho far.”
“Oh,” I said, for lack of any better response.
“I told you—sshe thtands under the rowan tree at moonrithe. When I thaw her there at firtht, I thought sshe wath a living woman. I wath afraid of what he might do, if he thaw her there alone—tho I sstole from the houthe to warn her.”
“I see.” Something in my voice must have sounded less than credulous, for her head turned sharply toward me. I took a firmer grip on the knife.
“You do not believe me?”
“Of course I do!” I assured her, trying to edge Hiram’s head off my lap. My left leg had gone to sleep from the pressure of his weight, and I had no feeling in my foot.
“I can thow you,” she said, and her voice was calm and certain. “Mary Ann told me where they were—the otherth—and I found them. I can thow you their graveth.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said, flexing my toes to restore circulation. If she came toward me, I decided, I would shove the goat into her path, roll to the side, and make off as fast as possible on all fours, shouting for Jamie. And where in bloody hell was Jamie, anyway?
“So . . . um . . . Fanny. You’re saying that Mr. Beardsley”—it occurred to me that I didn’t know his name either, but I thought I would just as soon keep my relations with his memory formal, under the circumstances—“that your husband murdered four wives? And no one knew?” Not that anyone necessarily would know, I realized. The Beardsley homestead was very isolated, and it wasn’t at all unusual for women to die—of accident, childbirth, or simple overwork. Someone might have known that Beardsley had lost four wives—but it was entirely possible that no one cared how.
“Yeth.” She sounded calm, I thought; not incipiently dangerous, at least. “He would have killed me, too—but Mary Ann thtopped him.”
“How did she do that?”
She drew a deep breath and sighed, settling herself on the ground. There was a faint, sleepy bleat from her lap, and I realized that she was holding the kid again. I relaxed my grip on the knife; she could hardly attack me with a lapful of goat.
She had, she said, gone out to speak to Mary Ann whenever the moon was high; the ghostly woman appeared under the rowan tree only between half-moon wax and half-moon wane—not in the dark of the moon, or at crescent.
“Very particular,” I murmured, but she didn’t notice, being too absorbed in the story.
This had gone on for some months. Mary Ann had told Fanny Beardsley who she was, informed her of the fate of her predecessors, and the manner of her own death.
“He choked her,” Fanny confided. “I could see the markth of his handth on her throat. Sshe warned me that he would do the thame to me, one day.”
One night a few weeks later, Fanny was sure that the time had come.
“He wath far gone with the rum, you thee,” she explained. “It wath alwayth worth when he drank, and thith time . . .”
Trembling with nerves, she had dropped the trencher with his supper, splattering food on him. He had sprung to his feet with a roar, lunging for her, and she had turned and fled.
“He wath between me and the door,” she said. “I ran for the loft. I hoped he would be too drunk to manage the ladder, and he wath.”
Beardsley had stumbled, lurching, and dragged the ladder down with a crash. As he struggled, mumbling and cursing, to put it into place again, there came a knock on the door.
Beardsley shouted to know who it was, but no answer came; only another knock at the door. Fanny had crept to the edge of the loft, to see his red face glaring up at her. The knock sounded for a third time. His tongue was too thick with drink to speak coherently; he only growled in his throat and held up a finger in warning to her, then