The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [453]
“He’s the witch’s get,” Jamie said shortly, as though that was sufficient answer—as perhaps it was.
“They thought I was a witch, too,” I reminded him, a little tartly. That got me a sideways blue glance, and a curve of the mouth.
“So they did,” he said. He cleared his throat, and wiped a sleeve across his sweating brow. “Aye, well. I suppose we must just wait and find out. And having a name helps. I shall send to Duncan and Farquard; have them put out word.” He drew a deep breath of exasperation, and blew it out again.
“What am I to do when I find him, though? Witch-son or no, he’s my own blood; I canna kill him. Not after Dougal—” He caught himself in time, and coughed. “I mean, he’s Dougal’s son. He’s my own cousin, for God’s sake.”
I knew what he really meant. Four people knew what had happened in that attic room at Culloden House, the day before that distant battle. One of those was dead, the other disappeared and almost certainly dead too, in the tumult of the Rising. Only I was left as the witness to Dougal’s blood and the hand that had spilled it. No matter what crime William Buccleigh MacKenzie had committed, Jamie would not kill him, for his father’s sake.
“You were going to kill him? Before you found out who he was?” Bree didn’t look shocked at the thought. She had a stained paint-rag in her hands, and was twisting it slowly.
Jamie turned to look at her.
“Roger Mac is your man, the son of my house,” he said, very seriously. “Of course I would avenge him.”
Brianna flicked a glance at me, then looked away. She looked thoughtful, with a certain intentness that gave me a slight chill to see.
“Good,” she said, very softly. “When you find William Buccleigh MacKenzie, I want to know about it.” She folded up the rag, thrust it into the pocket of her smock, and went back to her work.
BRIANNA SCRAPED a tiny blob of viridian onto the edge of her palette, and feathered a touch of it into the big smear of pale gray she had created. She hesitated a moment, tilting the palette back and forth in the light from the window to judge the color, then added the faintest dab of cobalt to the other side of the smear, producing a range of subtle tones that ran from blue-gray to green-gray, all so faint as scarcely to be distinguishable from white by the uneducated eye.
She took one of the short, thick brushes, and worked the gray tones along the curve of the jaw on her canvas with tiny overlapping strokes. Yes, that was just about right; pale as fired porcelain, but with a vivid shadow under it—something both delicate and earthy.
She painted with a deep absorption that shut out her surroundings, engrossed in an artist’s double vision, comparing the evolving image on the canvas with the one so immutably etched in her memory. It wasn’t that she had never seen a dead person before. Her father—Frank—had had an open-casket funeral, and she had been to the obsequies of older family friends in her own time, as well. But the colors of the embalmer’s art were crude, almost coarse by comparison with those of a fresh corpse. She had been staggered by the contrast.
It was the blood, she thought, taking a fine two-haired brush to add a dot of pure viridian in the deep curve of the eye socket. Blood and bone—but death didn’t alter the curves of the bones, nor the shadows they cast. Blood, though, colored those shadows. In life, you got the blues and reds and pinks and lavenders of moving blood beneath the skin; in death, the blood stilled and pooled and darkened . . . clay-blue, violet, indigo, purple-brown . . . and something new: that delicate, transient green, barely there, that her artist’s mind classified with brutal clarity as “early rot.”
Unfamiliar voices came from the hall, and she