48
WOODEARS
DESPITE HIS DISMISSAL of her worries, Jamie had promised his wife to look into the matter, and found opportunity to speak with Malva Christie a few days later.
Coming back from Kenny Lindsay’s place, he met a snake curled up in the dust of the path before him. It was a largish creature, but gaily striped—not one of the venomous vipers. Still, he couldn’t help it; snakes gave him the grue, and he did not wish to pick it up with his hands, nor yet to step over it. It might not be disposed to lunge up his kilt—but then again, it might. For its part, the snake remained stubbornly curled among the leaves, not budging in response to his “Shoo!” or the stamping of his foot.
He took a step to the side, found an alder, and cut a good stick from it, with which he firmly escorted the wee beastie off the path and into the wood. Affronted, the snake writhed off at a good rate of speed into a hobble-bush, and next thing, a loud shriek came from the other side of the bush.
He darted round it to find Malva Christie, making an urgent, though unsuccessful, effort to squash the agitated snake with a large basket.
“It’s all right, lass, let him go.” He seized her arm, causing a number of mushrooms to cascade out of her basket, and the snake decamped indignantly in search of quieter surroundings.
He crouched and scooped up the mushrooms for her, while she gasped and fanned herself with the end of her apron.
“Oh, thank ye, sir,” she said, bosom heaving. “I’m that terrified o’ snakes.”
“Och, well, that’s no but a wee king snake,” he said, affecting nonchalance. “Great ratters—or so I’m told.”
“Maybe so, but they’ve a wicked bite.” She shuddered briefly.
“Ye’ve no been bitten, have ye?” He stood up and dumped a final handful of fungus into her basket, and she curtsied in thanks.
“No, sir.” She straightened her cap “But Mr. Crombie was. Gully Dornan brought one of those things in a box, to Sunday meeting last, just for mischief, for he kent the text was For they shall take up poisonous serpents and suffer no harm. I think he meant to let it out in the midst of the prayin’.” She grinned at the telling, clearly reliving the event.
“But Mr. Crombie saw him with the box, and took it from him, not knowing what was in it. Well, so—Gully was shaking of the box, to keep the snake awake, and when Mr. Crombie opened it, the snake came out like a jack-i’-the-box and bit Mr. Crombie on the lip.”
Jamie couldn’t help smiling in turn.
“Did it, then? I dinna recall hearing about that.”
“Well, Mr. Crombie was that furious,” she said, trying for tact. “I imagine no one wanted to spread the story, sir, for fear he’d maybe pop with rage.”
“Aye, I see,” he said dryly. “And that’s why he wouldna come to have my wife see to the wound, I suppose.”
“Oh, he wouldna do that, sir,” she assured him, shaking her head. “Not if he was to have cut off his nose by mistake.”
“No?”
She picked up the basket, glancing shyly up at him.
“Well . . . no. Some say may be as your wife’s a witch, did ye ken that?”
He felt an unpleasant tightness in his wame, though he was not surprised to hear it.
“She is a Sassenach,” he answered, calm. “Folk will always say such things of a stranger, especially a woman.” He glanced sideways at her, but her eyes were modestly cast down to the contents of her basket. “Think so yourself, do ye?”
She looked up at that, gray eyes wide.
“Oh, no, sir! Never!”
She spoke with such earnestness that he smiled, despite the seriousness of his errand.
“Well, I suppose ye’d have noticed, so much time as ye spend in her surgery.”
“Oh, I should wish nothing but to be just like her, sir!” she assured him, clutching the handle of her basket in worshipful enthusiasm. “She is so kind and lovely, and she kens so much! I want to know all she can teach me, sir.”
“Aye, well. She’s said often how good it is to have such a pupil as yourself, lass. Ye’re a great help to her.” He cleared his throat, wondering how best to work round from these cordialities to a rude inquiry as to whether her father was interfering with her. “Ah . . . your Da doesna mind that ye spend so much time with my wife?”
A cloud fell upon her countenance at that, and her long black lashes swept down, hiding the dove-gray eyes.
“Oh. Well. He . . . he doesna say I mustna go.”
Jamie made a noncommittal sound in his throat, and gestured her ahead of him back to the path, where he strode along for a bit without further question, allowing her to regain her composure.
“What d’ye think your father will do,” he inquired, swishing his stick casually through a patch of toadflax, “once ye’ve wed and left his house? Is there a woman he might consider? He’d need someone to do for him, I expect.”
Her lips tightened at that, to his interest, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks.
“I dinna mean to be wed anytime soon, sir. We’ll manage well enough.”
Her answer was short enough to cause him to probe a bit.
“No? Surely ye’ve suitors, lass—the lads swoon after ye in droves; I’ve seen them.”
The flush on her skin bloomed brighter.
“Please, sir, ye’ll say no such thing to my faither!”
That rang a small alarm bell in him—but then, she might mean only that Tom Christie was a strict parent, vigilant of his daughter’s virtue. And he would have been astonished to the marrow to learn that Christie was soft, indulgent, or in any way delinquent in such responsibilities.
“I shall not,” he said mildly. “I was only teasin’, lass. Is your father sae fierce, then?”
She did look at him then, very direct.
“Thought ye kent him, sir.”
He burst out laughing at that, and after a moment’s hesitation, she joined him, with a small titter like the sound of the wee birds in the trees above.
“I do,” he said, recovering. “He’s a good man, Tom—if a bit dour.”
He looked to see the effect of this. Her face was still flushed, but there was a tiny residual smile on her lips. That was good.
“Well, so,” he resumed casually, “have ye enough of the woodears there?” He nodded at her basket. “I saw a good many yesterday, up near the Green Spring.”
“Oh, did ye?” She glanced up, interested. “Where?”
“I’m headed that way,” he said “Come if ye like, I’ll show ye.”
They made their way along the Ridge, talking of inconsequent things. He led her now and then back to the subject of her father, and noted that she seemed to have no reservations concerning him—only a prudent regard for his foibles and temper.
“Your brother, then,” he said thoughtfully, at one point. “Is he content, d’ye think? Or will he be wanting to leave, maybe go down to the coast? I ken he’s no really a farmer at heart, is he?”
She snorted a bit, but shook her head.
“No, sir, that he’s not.”
“What did he do, then? I mean, he grew up on a plantation, did he not?”
“Oh, no, sir.” She looked up at him, surprised. “He grew up in Edinburgh. We both did.”
He was taken back a bit at that. It was true, both she and Allan had an educated accent, but he had thought it only that Christie was a schoolmaster, and strict of such things.
“How is that, lass? Tom said he’d married here, in the Colonies.”
“Oh, so he did, sir,” she assured him hastily. “But his wife was not a bond servant; she went back to Scotland.”
“I see,” he said mildly, seeing her face grow much pinker and her lips press tight. Tom had said his wife had died—well, and he supposed she had, but in Scotland, after she’d left him. Proud as Christie was, he could hardly wonder that the man hadn’t confessed to his wife’s desertion. But—
“Is it true, sir, that your grandsire was Lord Lovat? Him they called the Old Fox?”
“Oh, aye,” he said, smiling. “I come from a long line of traitors, thieves, and bastards, ken?”
She laughed at that, and very prettily urged him to tell her more of his sordid family history—quite obviously, as a means of avoiding his asking more questions regarding hers.
The “but” lingered in his mind, though, even as they talked, with increasing desultoriness as they climbed through the dark, scented forest.
But. Tom Christie had been arrested two or three days after the Battle of Culloden, and imprisoned for the next ten years, before being transported to America. He did not know Malva’s exact age, but he thought she must be eighteen or so—though she often seemed older, her manner was so poised.
She must have been conceived, then, quite soon after Christie’s arrival in the Colonies. No great wonder, if the man had seized the first chance he had to marry, after living without a woman for so long. And then the wife had thought better of her bargain, and gone. Christie had told Roger Mac his wife had died of influenza—well, a man had his pride, and God knew Tom Christie had more than most.
But Allan Christie . . . where had he come from? The young man was somewhere in his twenties; it was possible that he had been conceived before Culloden. But if so—who was his mother?
“You and your brother,” he said abruptly, at the next break in conversation. “Did ye have the same mother?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, looking startled.
“Ah,” he said, and let the subject drop. Well, now. So Christie had been wed before Culloden. And then the woman, whoever she was, had come to find him in the Colonies. That argued a high degree of determination and devotion, and made him regard Christie with a good deal more interest. But that devotion had not been proof against the hardships of the Colonies—or else she found Tom so changed by time and circumstance that the devotion had been drowned in disappointment, and she had left again.
He could see that, easily—and felt an unexpected bond of sympathy with Tom Christie. He recalled his own feelings, all too well, when Claire came back to find him. The disbelieving joy of her presence—and the bone-deep fear that she would not recognize the man she had known, in the man who stood before her.
Worse, if she had discovered something that made her flee—and well as he knew Claire, he still was not sure that she would have stayed, if he’d told her at once about his marriage to Laoghaire. For that matter, if Laoghaire hadn’t shot him and nearly killed him, Claire might well have run away, and been lost for good. The thought of it was a black pit, gaping at his feet.
Of course, had she gone, he would have died, he reflected. And never come to this place and got his land, nor seen his daughter, nor held his grandson in his arms. Come to think, perhaps being nearly killed wasn’t always a misfortune—so long as you didn’t actually die of it.
“Does your arm trouble ye, sir?” He was jerked back from his thoughts to realize that he was standing like a fool, one hand clutching the spot on his upper arm where Laoghaire’s pistol ball had gone through and Malva squinting at him in concern.
“Ah, no,” he said hastily, dropping his hand. “A midgie bite. The bittie things are out early. Tell me”—he groped for some neutral topic of conversation—“d’ye like it here in the mountains?”
Inane as the question was, she appeared to consider it seriously.
“It’s lonely, sometimes,” she said, and glanced into the forest, where falling shafts of sunlight splintered on leaves and needles, shrubs and rocks, filling the air with a shattered green light. “But it is . . .” she groped for a word. “Pretty,” she said, with a small smile at him, acknowledging the inadequacy of the word.
They had reached the small clearing where the water bubbled out over a ledge of what his daughter said was serpentine—the rock whose soft green gave the spring its name; that, and the thick layer of vivid moss that grew around it.
He gestured to her to kneel and drink first. She did, cupping her hands to her face and closing her eyes in bliss at the taste of the cold, sweet water. She gulped, cupped her hands and drank again, almost greedily. She was very pretty herself, he thought in amusement, and the word was much more appropriate to the wee lassie, with that delicate chin and the lobes of her tender pink ears peeping from her cap, than to the spirit of the mountains. Her mother must have been lovely, he thought—and it was fortunate for the lass that she had not taken much of her father’s grim looks, save those gray eyes.
She sat back on her heels, breathing deep, and scooted to the side, nodding at him to kneel and take his turn. The day wasn’t hot, but it was a steep climb to the spring, and the cold water went down gratefully.
“I’ve never seen the Highlands,” Malva said, dabbing the end of her kerchief over her wet face. “Some say this place is like it, though. D’ye think so yourself, sir?”
He shook the water from his fingers and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Something like. Some parts. The Great Glen, and the forest—aye, that’s verra like this.” He pointed his chin up at the trees surrounding them, murmurous and resin-scented. “But there’s nay bracken here. And nay peat, of course. And nay heather; that’s the biggest difference.”
“Ye hear the stories—of men hiding in the heather. Did ye ever do so yourself, sir?” She dimpled slightly, and he didn’t know whether she meant to tease, or was only making conversation.
“Now and then,” he said, and smiled at her as he rose, brushing pine needles from his kilt. “Stalking the deer, aye? Here, I’ll show ye the woodears.”
The fungus grew in thick shelves at the foot of an oak, no more than ten feet from the spring. Some of the things had opened their gills already, begun to darken and curl; the ground nearby was scattered with the spores, a dark brown powder that lay upon the glossy crackle of last year’s dry leaves. The fresher fungi were still bright, though, deep orange and meaty.
He left her there with a cordial word, and went back down the narrow trail, wondering about the woman who had loved and left Tom Christie.