The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [653]
Breathing very shallowly, I followed him. Phaedre had begun to moan in the darkness outside; she sounded like the ban-sidhe that howls for approaching death—but this death had come long since.
The coffins were equipped with brass plates, gone slightly green with damp, but still easily readable. “Hector Alexander Robert Cameron,” read one, and “Jocasta Isobeail MacKenzie Cameron,” the other. Without hesitation, Jamie seized the edges of the lid of Jocasta’s coffin and pulled up.
It wasn’t nailed; the lid was heavy, but shifted at once.
“Oh,” Jamie said softly, looking down.
Gold will never tarnish, no matter how damp or dank its surroundings. It will lie at the bottom of the sea for centuries, to emerge one day in some random fisherman’s net, bright as the day it was smelted. It glimmers from a rocky matrix, a siren’s song that has called to men for thousands of years.
The ingots lay in a shallow layer over the bottom of the coffin. Enough to fill two small chests, each chest heavy enough to require two men—or a man and a strong woman—to carry it. Each ingot stamped with a fleur-de-lis. One third of the Frenchman’s gold.
I blinked at the shimmer, and looked aside, my eyes blurring with fractured light. It was dark on the floor, but I could still make out the huddled form against the pale marble. “Nosing where he should not.” And what had he seen, Daniel Rawlings, that had made him draw the fleur-de-lis in the margin of his casebook, with that discreet notation, “Aurum”?
Hector Cameron was still alive, then. The mausoleum had not yet been sealed. Perhaps when Dr. Rawlings rose to follow his wandering patient, Hector had led him here unwitting, going down in the night to view his hoard? Perhaps. Neither Hector Cameron nor Daniel Rawlings could say, now, how it had been, or what had happened.
I felt a thickening in my throat, for the man whose bones lay now at my feet, the friend and colleague whose instruments I had inherited, whose shade had stood at my elbow, lending me both courage and comfort, when I laid hands on the sick and sought to heal them.
“Such a waste,” I said softly, looking down.
Jamie lowered the coffin lid, gently, as though the coffin held an occupant whose rest had been disturbed.
Outside, Jocasta stood still on the path. She had an arm round Phaedre, who had stopped whimpering, but it was not clear which of them was supporting the other. Jocasta must know now from the noise where we were, but she faced the river still, eyes fixed, unblinking in the torchlight.
I cleared my throat, hugging the shawl tighter with my free hand.
“What shall we do, then?” I asked Jamie.
He turned and looked back into the tomb for a moment, then shrugged a little.
“We’ll leave the Lieutenant to Hector, as we planned. As for the doctor . . .” He drew breath slowly, troubled gaze fixed on the slender bones that lay in a graceful fan, pale and still in the light. A surgeon’s hand—once.
“I think,” he said, “we will take him home with us—to the Ridge. Let him lie among friends.”
He brushed past the two women without acknowledgment or pardon, and went to fetch Lieutenant Wolff.
105
A THRUSH’S DREAM
Fraser’s Ridge
May, 1772
THE NIGHT AIR WAS COOL and fresh. So early in the year, the bloodthirsty flies and mosquitoes hadn’t started yet; only random moths came in through the open window now and then, to flutter round the smoored hearth like bits of burning paper, brushing past their outflung limbs in brief caress.
She lay as she had fallen, half on top of him, heart thumping loud and slow in her ears. From here, she could see out through the window; the jagged black line of trees on the far side of the dooryard, and beyond them a section of sky, lit with stars, so near and bright that it should be possible to step out among them and walk from one to another, higher and higher, to the hook of the crescent moon.
“You’re not mad at me?” he whispered. He spoke more easily now, but lying with her ear on his chest, she could