The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [30]
Roger bent over the genealogical chart, then looked up, moss-green eyes thoughtful.
“This one? William Buccleigh MacKenzie, born 1744, of William John MacKenzie and Sarah Innes. Died 1782.”
Claire shook her head. “Died 1744, aged two months, of smallpox.” She looked up, and the golden eyes met his with a force that sent a shiver down his spine. “Yours wasn’t the first adoption in that family, you know,” she said. Her finger tapped the entry. “He needed a wet nurse,” she said. “His own mother was dead—so he was given to a family that had lost a baby. They called him by the name of the child they had lost—that was common—and I don’t suppose anyone wanted to call attention to his ancestry by recording the new child in the parish register. He would have been baptized at birth, after all; it wasn’t necessary to do it again. Colum told me where they placed him.”
“Geillis Duncan’s son,” he said slowly. “The witch’s child.”
“That’s right.” She gazed at him appraisingly, head cocked to one side. “I knew it must be, when I saw you. The eyes, you know. They’re hers.”
Claire tells Roger that the decision must be his; this is 1968, the year of Geillis Duncan’s disappearance into the past, and the feast of Beltane is fast approaching. Shall they try to find the woman, and stop her? For if she goes, she goes to meet a fiery death in the past, condemned as a witch. But if she does not go—
“I’ll leave it to you,“ Claire said quietly. ”It’s your right to say. Shall I look for her?”
Roger lifted his head off the table and blinked at her incredulously. “Shall you look for her?” he said. “If this—if it’s all true—then we have to find her, don’t we? If she’s going back to be burned alive? Of course you have to find her,” he burst out. “How could you consider anything else?”
“And if I do find her?” she replied. She placed a slender hand on the grubby chart and raised her eyes to his. “What happens to you?” she asked softly.
If Geilie Duncan returns to the past, she will bear the child who is Roger’s ancestor—and she will die in a barrel of pitch, burned as a witch. If she does not go back through the stones, presumably she will be saved from a ghastly death … but what then of her child … and of Roger?
Reeling from the shocks of the day, Roger is staggered by this final, personal revelation. Still, he decides that they must find the woman known as Geillis Duncan— find her, talk to her, and—perhaps—prevent her return to a deadly past.
Accompanied by a reluctant and suspicious Brianna, Roger sets out to help Claire find Geillis Duncan—known in this time as Gillian Edgars. As they search out the trail of the mysterious witch whose green eyes look mockingly out of Roger’s mirror each day, he realizes Claire’s stake in the matter: not just a feeling of obligation toward Geillis Duncan, who saved her life in the past. Geillis/Gillian is the only real proof of the truth of Claire’s story—for seeing someone actually disappear through the standing stones would convince even Brianna.
Roger and Brianna find Gillian’s husband, Greg Edgars, but too late—Gillian has left home a week before, and no one knows where she is. With her friends, the Scottish Nationalists and neo-Jacobites, Greg gloomily suggests; his wife’s obsession with Scotland’s past has led her away from home before.
Claire has traced the missing woman to a local school, where she finds Gillian’s notebooks—a mixture of raving lunacy and reasoned logic.
The notebook suggests what Claire has suspected; that the door to the past stands widest open on the ancient feasts of sun and fire—and one such feast is hard upon them; it is Beltane, the date upon which Claire herself disappeared in 1946.
Going to the sinister hill of Craigh na Dun at night, they find Gillian/Geillis’s car, but no sign of the woman. Climbing the hill to the circle of standing stones, Roger smells petrol—and a sudden whiff of fire illuminates the circle. Gillian Edgars has lured her husband to the hill, and in the belief that a blood sacrifice will open the door