The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [511]
He blinked when the blindfold was taken off, the sudden flood of light compensating for its dimness. It was late twilight. They stood in a hollow, already halfway filled with darkness. Looking up, he saw the sky above the mountains blazing with orange and crimson, the smoky haze lit up as though the world itself were still burning. Overhead, the clouds had broken; a slice of pure blue sky shone through, soft, and bright with twilight stars.
Fanny Beardsley faced him, looking smaller beneath the canopy of a towering chestnut tree, but every bit as intent as she had in the hut.
He had had plenty of time to think about it. Ought he to tell her where the child was, or should he claim not to know? If she knew, would she make an attempt to reclaim the little girl? And if so, what might be the fallout—for the child, the escaped slaves—or even for Jamie and Claire Fraser?
Neither of them had said anything about the events that had transpired at the Beardsley farmhouse, beyond the simple fact that Beardsley had died of an apoplexy. Roger was sufficiently familiar with them both, though, to draw silent deductions from Claire’s troubled face and Jamie’s impassive one. He didn’t know what had happened, but Fanny Beardsley did—and it might well be something the Frasers would prefer remain undiscovered. If Mrs. Beardsley reappeared in Brownsville, seeking to reclaim her daughter, questions would certainly be asked—and perhaps it was to no one’s benefit that they be answered.
The blazing sky washed her face with fire, though, and faced with the hunger in those burning eyes, he could speak nothing but the truth.
“Your daughter . . . is well,” he began firmly, and she made a small strangled noise, deep in her throat. By the time he had finished telling what he knew, the tears were running down her face, making tracks in the soot and dust that covered her, but her eyes stayed wide, fixed on him as though to blink would be to miss some vital word.
The man hung back a little, wary, keeping watch. His attention was mostly on the woman, but he stole occasional glances at Roger as he spoke, and at the end, stood beside the woman, his one eye bright as hers.
“She have de money?” he asked. He had the lilt of the Indies in his speech, and a skin like dark honey. He would have been handsome, save for whatever accident had deprived him of his eye, leaving a pocket of livid flesh beneath a twisted, drooping lid.
“Yes, she’s . . . inherited . . . all of Aaron . . . Beardsley’s property,” Roger assured him, breath rasping in his throat from so much talking. “Mr. Fraser saw . . . to it.” He and Jamie had both gone to the hearing of the Orphan’s Court, for Jamie to bear witness to the girl’s identity. Richard Brown and his wife had been given the guardianship of the child—and her property. They had named the little girl—from what depths of sentiment or outrage, he had no idea—“Alicia.”
“No matta she black?” He saw the slave’s one eye flick sideways toward Fanny Beardsley, then slide away. Mrs. Beardsley heard the note of uncertainty in the man’s voice, and turned on him like a viper striking.
“She is yourss!” she said. “She could not be histh, could not!”
“Yah, you say so,” he replied, his face cast down in sullenness. “Dey give money to black girl?”
She stamped her foot, noiseless on the ground, and slapped at him. He straightened up and turned his face aside, but made no other attempt to escape her fury.
“Do you think I would have left her, ever left her, if she had been white, if she could posthibly have been white?” she shouted. She punched at him, pummelling his arms and chest with blows. “It wath your fault I had to leave her,