* * *
The guard at the door jumped back in surprise as Charles flung the door open and strode past him without a glance. On the far side of the long, tapestry-hung room was an enormous marble fireplace, lined with white Delft tiles, painted with Dutch country scenes in shades of blue and mulberry. A small sofa was drawn up before the fire, and a big, broad-shouldered man in Highland dress stood beside it.
In a room less imposing, he would have bulked huge, legs like tree trunks in their checkered stockings beneath the kilt. As it was, in this immense room with its high gessoed ceilings, he was merely big—quite in keeping with the heroic figures of mythology that decorated the tapestries at either end of the room.
I stopped dead at sight of the enormous visitor, the shock of recognition still mingled with absolute incredulity. Charles had kept on, and now glanced back with some impatience, beckoning me to join him before the fire. I nodded to the big man. Then I walked slowly around the end of the sofa and gazed down at the man who lay upon it.
He smiled faintly when he saw me, the dove-gray eyes lighting with a spark of amusement.
“Yes,” he said, answering my expression. “I hadn’t really expected to meet you again, either. One might almost believe we are fated.” He turned his head and lifted a hand toward his enormous body-servant.
“Angus. Will ye fetch a drop of the brandy for Mistress Claire? I’m afraid the surprise of seeing me may have somewhat discomposed her.”
That, I thought, was putting it mildly. I sank into a splay-footed chair and accepted the crystal goblet Angus Mhor held out to me.
Colum MacKenzie’s eyes hadn’t changed; neither had his voice. Both held the essence of the man who had led clan MacKenzie for thirty years, despite the disease that had crippled him in his teens. Everything else had changed sadly for the worse, though; the black hair streaked heavily with gray, the lines of his face cut deep into skin that had fallen slack over the sharp outlines of bone. Even the broad chest was sunken and the powerful shoulders hunched, flesh fallen away from the fragile skeleton beneath.
He already held a glass half-filled with amber liquid, glowing in the firelight. He raised himself painfully to a sitting position and lifted the cup in ironic salute.
“You’re looking very well…niece.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Charles’s mouth drop open.
“You aren’t,” I said bluntly.
He glanced dispassionately down at the bowed and twisted legs. In a hundred years’ time, they would call this disease after its most famous sufferer—the Toulouse-Lautrec syndrome.
“No,” he said. “But then, it’s been two years since you saw me last. Mrs. Duncan estimated my survival at less than two years, then.”
I took a swallow of the brandy. One of the best. Charles was anxious.
“I shouldn’t have thought you’d put much stock in a witch’s curse,” I said.
A smile twitched the fine-cut lips. He had the bold beauty of his brother Dougal, ruined as it was, and when he lifted the veil of detachment from his eyes, the power of the man overshone the wreck of his body.
“Not in curses, no. I had the distinct impression that the lady was dealing in observation, however, not malediction. And I have seldom met a more acute observer than Geillis Duncan—with one exception.” He inclined his head gracefully toward me, making his meaning clear.
“Thanks,” I said.
Colum glanced up at Charles, who was gaping in bewilderment at these exchanges.
“I thank you for your graciousness in permitting me to use your premises for my meeting with Mrs. Fraser, Your Highness,” he said, with a slight bow. The words were sufficiently civil, but the tone made it an obvious dismissal. Charles, who was by no means used to being dismissed, flushed hotly and opened his mouth. Then, recalling himself, he snapped it shut, bowed shortly, and turned on his heel.
“We won’t need the guard, either,” I called after him. His shoulders hunched and the back of his neck grew red beneath the tail of his wig, but he gestured abruptly, and the guard at the door, with an astonished glance at me, followed him out.
“Hm.” Colum cast a brief glance of disapproval at the door, then returned his attention to me.
“I asked to see you because I owe ye an apology,” he said, without preamble.
I leaned back in my chair, goblet resting nonchalantly on my stomach.
“Oh, an apology?” I said, with as much sarcasm as could be mustered on short notice. “For trying to have me burnt for witchcraft, I suppose you mean?” I flipped a hand in gracious dismissal. “Pray think nothing of it.” I glared at him. “Apology?!”
He smiled, not disconcerted in the slightest.
“I suppose it seems a trifle inadequate,” he began.
“Inadequate?! For having me arrested and thrown into a thieves’ hole for three days without decent food or water? For having me stripped half-naked and whipped before every person in Cranesmuir? For leaving me a hairsbreadth away from a barrel of pitch and a bundle of faggots?” I stopped and took a deep breath. “Now that you mention it,” I said, a little more calmly, “ ‘inadequate’ is precisely what I’d call it.”
The smile had vanished.
“I beg your pardon for my apparent levity,” he said softly. “I had no intent to mock you.”
I looked at him, but could see no lingering gleam of amusement in the black-lashed eyes.
“No,” I said, with another deep breath. “I don’t suppose you did. I suppose you’re going to say that you had no intent to have me arrested for witchcraft, either.”
The gray eyes sharpened. “You knew that?”
“Geilie said so. While we were in the thieves’ hole. She said it was her you meant to dispose of; I was an accident.”
“You were.” He looked suddenly very tired. “Had ye been in the castle, I could have protected you. What in the name of God led ye to go down to the village?”
“I was told that Geilie Duncan was ill and asking for me,” I replied shortly.
“Ah,” he said softly. “You were told. By whom, and I may ask?”
“Laoghaire.” Even now, I could not repress a brief spurt of rage at the girl’s name. Out of thwarted jealousy over my having married Jamie, she had deliberately tried to have me killed. Considerable depths of malice for a sixteen-year-old girl. And even now, mingled with the rage was that tiny spark of grim satisfaction; he’s mine, I thought, almost subconsciously. Mine. You’ll never take him from me. Never.
“Ah,” Colum said again, staring thoughtfully at my flushed countenance. “I thought perhaps that was the way of it. Tell me,” he continued, raising one dark brow, “if a mere apology strikes you as inadequate, will ye have vengeance instead?”
“Vengeance?” I must have looked startled at the idea, for he smiled faintly, though without humor.
“Aye. The lass was wed six months ago, to Hugh MacKenzie of Muldaur, one of my tacksmen. He’ll do with her as I say, and ye want her punished. What will ye have me do?”
I blinked, taken aback by his offer. He appeared in no hurry for an answer; he sat quietly, sipping the fresh glass of brandy that Angus Mhor poured for him. He wasn’t staring at me, but I got up and moved away toward the windows, wanting to be alone for a moment.
The walls here were five feet thick; by leaning forward into the deep window embrasure I could assure myself of privacy. The bright sun illuminated the fine blond hairs on my forearms as I rested them on the sill. It made me think of the thieves’ hole, that damp, reeking pit, and the single bar of sunlight that had shone through an opening above, making the dark hole below seem that much more like a grave by contrast.
I had spent my first day there in cold and dirt, full of stunned disbelief; the second in shivering misery and growing fear as I discovered the full extent of Geillis Duncan’s treachery and Colum’s measures against it. And on the third day, they had taken me to trial. And I had stood, filled with shame and terror, under the clouds of a lowering autumn sky, feeling the jaws of Colum’s trap close round me, sprung by a word from the girl Laoghaire.
Laoghaire. Fair-skinned and blue-eyed, with a round, pretty face, but nothing much to distinguish her from the other girls at Leoch. I had thought about her—in the pit with Geillis Duncan, I had had time to think of a lot of things. But furious and terrified as I had been, furious as I remained, I couldn’t, either then or now, bring myself to see her as intrinsically evil.
“She was only sixteen, for God’s sake!”
“Old enough to marry,” said a sardonic voice behind me, and I realized that I had spoken aloud.
“Yes, she wanted Jamie,” I said, turning around. Colum was still sitting on the sofa, stumpy legs covered with a rug. Angus Mhor stood silent behind him, heavy-lidded eyes fixed on his master. “Perhaps she thought she loved him.”
Men were drilling in the courtyard, amid shouts and clashing of arms. The sun glanced off the metal of swords and muskets, the brass studding of targes—and off the red-gold of Jamie’s hair, flying in the breeze as he wiped a hand across his face, flushed and sweating from the exercise, laughing at one of Murtagh’s deadpan remarks.
I had perhaps done Laoghaire an injustice, after all, in assuming her feelings to be less than my own. Whether she had acted from immature spite or from a true passion, I could never know. In either case, she had failed. I had survived. And Jamie was mine. As I watched, he rucked up his kilt and casually scratched his bottom, the sunlight catching the reddish-gold fuzz that softened the iron-hard curve of his thigh. I smiled, and went back to my seat near Colum.
“I’ll take the apology,” I said.
He nodded, gray eyes thoughtful.
“You’ve a belief in mercy, then, Mistress?”
“More in justice,” I said. “Speaking of which, I don’t imagine you traveled all the way from Leoch to Edinburgh merely to apologize to me. It must have been a hellish journey.”
“Aye, it was.” The huge, silent bulk of Angus Mhor shifted an inch or two behind him, and the massive head bent toward his laird in eloquent witness. Colum sensed the movement and raised a hand briefly—it’s all right, the gesture said, I’m all right for the present.
“No,” Colum went on. “I did not know ye were in Edinburgh, in fact, until His Highness mentioned Jamie Fraser, and I asked.” A sudden smile grew on his face. “His Highness isn’t over fond of you, Mistress Claire. But I suppose ye knew that?”
I ignored this. “So you really are considering joining Prince Charles?”
Colum, Dougal, and Jamie all had the capacity for hiding what they were thinking when they chose to, but of the three, Colum was undoubtedly best at it. You’d get more from one of the carved heads on the fountain in the front courtyard, if he was feeling uncommunicative.
“I’ve come to see him” was all he said.
I sat a moment, wondering what, if anything, I could—or should—say in Charles’s behalf. Perhaps I would do better to leave it to Jamie. After all, the fact that Colum felt regret over nearly killing me by accident didn’t mean he was necessarily inclined to trust me. And while the fact that I was here, part of Charles’s entourage, surely argued against my being an English spy, it wasn’t impossible that I was.
I was still debating with myself when Colum suddenly put down his glass of brandy and looked straight at me.
“D’ye know how much of this I’ve had since morning?”
“No.” His hands were steady, calloused and roughened from his disease, but well kept. The reddened lids and slightly bloodshot eyes could as easily be from the rigors of travel as from drink. There was no slurring of speech, and no more than a certain deliberateness of movement to indicate that he wasn’t sober as a judge. But I had seen Colum drink before, and had a very respectful idea of his capacity.
He waved away Angus Mhor’s hand, hovering above the decanter. “Half a bottle. I’ll have finished it by tonight.”
“Ah.” So that was why I had been asked to bring my medicine box. I reached for it, where I had set it on the floor.
“If you’re needing that much brandy, there isn’t much that will help you besides some form of opium,” I said, flicking through my assortment of vials and jars. “I think I have some laudanum here, but I can get you some—”
“That isn’t what I want from you.” The tone of authority in his voice stopped me, and I looked up. If he could keep his thoughts to himself, he could also let them show when he chose.
“I could get laudanum easily enough,” he said. “I imagine there’s an apothecarist in the city who sells it—or poppy syrup, or undiluted opium, for that matter.”
I let the lid of the small chest fall shut and rested my hands on top of it. So he didn’t mean to waste away in a drugged state, leaving the leadership of the clan uncertain. And if it were not a temporary oblivion he sought from me, what else? A permanent one, perhaps. I knew Colum MacKenzie. And the clear, ruthless mind that had planned Geillis Duncan’s destruction would not hesitate over his own.
Now it was clear. He had come to see Charles Stuart, to make the final decision whether to commit the MacKenzies of Leoch to the Jacobite cause. Once committed, it would be Dougal who led the clan. And then…
“I was under the impression that suicide was considered a mortal sin,” I said.
“I imagine it is,” he said, undisturbed. “A sin of pride, at least, that I should choose a clean death at the time of my own devising, as best suits my purpose. I don’t, however, expect to suffer unduly for my sin, having put no credence in the existence of God since I was nineteen or so.”
It was quiet in the room, beyond the crackle of the fire and the muffled shouts of mock battle from below. I could hear his breathing, a slow and steady sigh.
“Why ask me?” I said. “You’re right, you could get laudanum where you liked, so long as you have money—and you do. Surely you know that enough of it will kill you. It’s an easy death, at that.”
“Too easy.” He shook his head. “I have had little to depend on in life, save my wits. I would keep them, even to meet death. As for ease…” He shifted slightly on the sofa, making no effort to hide his discomfort. “I shall have enough, presently.”
He nodded toward my box. “You shared Mrs. Duncan’s knowledge of medicines. I thought it possible that you knew what she used to kill her husband. That seemed quick and certain. And appropriate,” he added wryly.
“She used witchcraft, according to the verdict of the court.” The court that condemned her to death, in accordance with your plan, I thought. “Or do you not believe in witchcraft?” I asked.
He laughed, a pure, carefree sound in the sunlit room. “A man who doesn’t believe in God can scarce credit power to Satan, can he?”
I still hesitated, but he was a man who judged others as shrewdly as he did himself. He had asked my pardon before asking my favor, and satisfied himself that I had a sense of justice—or of mercy. And it was, as he said, appropriate. I opened the box and took out the small vial of cyanide that I kept to kill rats.
“I thank ye, Mistress Claire,” he said, formal again, though the smile still lingered in his eyes. “Had my nephew not proved your innocence with such flamboyance at Cranesmuir, still I would never believe you a witch. I have no more notion now than I had at our first meeting, as to who you are, or why you are here, but a witch is not one of the possibilities I’ve ever considered.” He paused, one brow raised. “I don’t suppose you’d be inclined to tell me who—or what—you are?”
I hesitated for a moment. But a man with belief in neither God nor Devil was not likely to believe the truth of my presence here, either. I squeezed his fingers lightly and released them.
“Better call me a witch,” I said. “It’s as close as you’re likely to get.”