The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [470]
I glanced at Jamie, who was brooding, eyes half-closed over his long, straight nose. I didn’t bother suggesting that we allow Laoghaire to put in for a gaberlunzie badge and go begging through the parish. No matter what he thought of the woman personally, he considered her his responsibility, and that was that.
I supposed that paying the debt in casks of salt fish and lye-soap was not a suitable option, either. That left us three alternatives: We could sell the whisky from the cache, though that would be a great loss in the long term. We could borrow money from Jocasta; possible, but highly distasteful. Or we could sell something else. Several horses, for instance. A large number of pigs. Or a jewel.
The candle was burning strongly, and the wax around the wick had melted. Looking down into the clear puddle of molten wax, I could see them: three gemstones, dark against the pale gray-gold of the candle, their vivid hues subdued but still visible in the wax. An emerald, a topaz, and a black diamond.
Jamie didn’t touch them, but stared at them, thick ruddy brows drawn together in concentration.
Selling a gemstone in colonial North Carolina would not be easy; it would likely require a trip to Charleston or Richmond. It could be done, though, and would result in enough money to pay Laoghaire her blood-money, as well as to meet the other mounting expenses. The gemstones had a value, though, that went beyond money—they were the currency of travel through the stones; protection for the life of a traveler.
What few things we knew about that perilous journey were based largely on the things that Geillis Duncan had written or had told me; it was her contention that gems gave a traveler not only protection from the chaos in that unspeakable space between the layers of time, but some ability to navigate, as it were—to choose the time in which one might emerge.
Moved by impulse, I went back to the shelf, and standing on tiptoe, groped for the hide-wrapped bundle hidden in the shadows there. It was heavy in my hand, and I unwrapped it carefully, laying the oval stone on the desk beside the candle. It was a large opal, its fiery heart revealed within a matrix of dull stone by the carving that covered the surface—a spiral; a primitive drawing of the snake that eats its tail.
The opal was the property of another traveler—the mysterious Indian called Otter-Tooth. An Indian whose skull showed silver fillings in the teeth; an Indian who seemed at one time to have spoken English. He had called this stone his “ticket back”—so it seemed that Geilie Duncan was not the only one who believed that gemstones had some power in that dreadful place . . . between.
“Five, the witch said,” Jamie said thoughtfully. “She said ye needed five stones?”
“She thought so.” It was a warm evening, but the down hairs on my jaw prickled at the thought of Geilie Duncan, of the stones—and of the Indian I had met on a dark hillside, his face painted black for death, just before I had found the opal, and the skull buried with it. Was it his skull we had buried, silver fillings and all?
“Was it needful for the stones to be polished, or cut?”
“I don’t know. I think she said cut ones were better—but I don’t know why she thought so—or if she was right.” That was always the rub; we knew so little for sure.
He made a little hmf noise, and rubbed the bridge of his nose slowly with one knuckle.
“Well, we’ve these three, and my father’s ruby. Those are cut and polished stones, and that makes four. Then that wee bawbee”—he glanced at the opal—“and the stone in your amulet, which are not.” The point here being that the cut or polished stones would fetch a great deal more in cash than would the rough opal or the raw sapphire in my medicine bag. And yet—could we risk losing a stone that might be needed, that might someday spell the difference between life and death for Bree or Roger?
“It’s not likely,” I said, answering his thought, rather than his words. “Bree will stay, certainly until Jemmy’s grown; perhaps for good.” After