The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [48]
“Will ye forgive me?
“Geneva—Willie’s mother—she wanted my body,” he said softly, watching the gecko’s pulsating sides. “Laoghaire needed my name, and the work of my hands to keep her and her bairns.” He turned his head then, dark blue eyes fixed on mine. “John— well,” he lifted his shoulders and let them drop. “I couldna give him what he wanted—and he is friend enough not to ask it.
“But how shall I tell ye all these things,” he said, the lines of his mouth twisting. “And then say to you—it is only you I have ever loved? How should you believe me?”
The question hung in the air between us, shimmering like the reflection from the water below.
“I’ll believe you, if you say it.”
I pressed my own wrist against his, pulse to pulse, heartbeat to heartbeat.
“Blood of my blood,” I whispered.
“Bone of my bone.” His whisper was deep and husky. He knelt quite suddenly before me, and put his folded hands in mine; the gesture a Highlander makes when swearing loyalty to his chieftain.
“I give ye my spirit,” he said, head bent over our hands.
“’Til our life shall be done,” I said softly “But it isn’t done yet, Jamie, is it?”
Then he rose and took the shift from me, and I lay back on the narrow bed naked, pulled him down to me through the soft yellow light, and took him home, and home, and home again, and we were neither one of us alone.
United again, Jamie and Claire pursue the search for Ian to Rose Hall. Arriving at the remote plantation, they are admitted and sit down to wait for Mrs. Abernathy, the owner. Her appearance, though, comes as more than a surprise, for “Mrs. Abernathy” is no stranger.
I took a deep breath, and got my voice back.
“I trust you won’t take this the wrong way,” I said, sinking slowly back onto the wicker sofa, “but why aren’t you dead?”
She laughed, the silver in her voice as clear as a young girl’s.
“Think I should have been, do you? Well, you’re no the first—and I daresay you’ll no be the last to think so, either.”
Geillis Duncan—as the mistress of Rose Hall was once known—explains her escape from burning, in the aftermath of the witch trial at Cranesmuir, twenty-odd years before. Reprieved from execution until after the birth of her child, Geillis blackmailed the child’s father, Dougal MacKenzie, by threatening to kill the child, and forced him to help her escape. The body of an elderly woman who had died of natural causes was substituted for her own presumably strangled body, and sent to heaven in a pillar of fire. Geillis herself had escaped to France, and come by various paths to her present estate. And what, she asks with avid curiosity, of Claire?
The two women, once friends, are wary of each other, but consumed by curiosity. Alone of all the world, they think, they have the gift of travel through the stones. Geilie remarks that she has met “one other” like them, but is still insistent on learning all she can of Claire’s experiences—the more so when she finds the photographs of Brianna in Jamie’s coat pocket and realizes the truth; that Claire has traveled through the stones not once, but three times! How was it done?
In return to Claire’s vague answers, Geilie reveals the results of her own research; she has concluded that travel through the stones can be controlled—to some degree, at least—by use of gem-stones, and to this end, has collected many large and flawless jewels. Her casual reference to using “blood” as a means of protection passes with no more than a slight shudder; Claire knows about the murder of Geillis’s first husband, Greg Edgars— and the second, Arthur Duncan.
Claire’s heart beats faster at sight of the box Geilie produces, showing off the gems; it is the box that Jamie found on the seals’ island—sure proof of a connection between Geillis Duncan and the pirates of the Bruja; proof, she thinks, that despite Geilie’s denials, Young Ian must be hidden somewhere on the estate.
Geilie firmly denies all knowledge of the boy, though, and hurries them away, claiming that an important visitor is expected.