THE FRONT OF THE MAUSOLEUM was covered by an ornamental grille of black wrought iron, with an enormous lock, its metal decorated by sixteen-petalled Jacobite roses. I had always considered this to be merely one of Jocasta Cameron’s affectations, since I doubted that grave-robbers were a great threat in such a rural setting. The hinges scarcely creaked when Jamie unlocked the grille and swung it open; like everything else at River Run, it was maintained in impeccable condition.
“You really think this is better than burying or burning him?” I asked. There was no one nearby, but I spoke in a near whisper.
“Oh, aye. Auld Hector will take care of him, and prevent him doin’ harm,” Jamie replied matter-of-factly. “And it’s blessed ground, in a manner of speaking. No a matter of leaving his soul to wander about, makin’ trouble, aye?”
I nodded, a little uncertainly. He was probably right; in terms of belief, Jamie understood the slaves much better than I did. For that matter, I wasn’t sure whether he was speaking only of what the psychological effect on them might be—or whether he was himself convinced that Hector Cameron ought to be capable of dealing with this ex post facto threat to his wife and plantation.
I lifted the torch so Jamie could see what he was doing, and set my teeth in my lower lip.
He had wrapped the sledgehammer in rags, so as not to chip the marble blocks. The small blocks of the front wall, inside the grille, had been expertly cut to fit and lightly mortared in place. The first blow knocked two of the blocks a few inches out of place. A few more blows, and a dark space showed, where the blocks had given way enough to show the blackness inside the mausoleum.
Jamie stopped to wipe sweat from his forehead, and muttered something under his breath.
“What did you say?”
“I said, it stinks,” he replied, sounding puzzled.
“This is surprising, is it?” I asked, a little testily. “How long has Hector Cameron been dead, four years?”
“Well, aye, but it’s no—”
“What are you doing?” Jocasta Cameron’s voice rang out behind me, sharp with agitation, and I jumped, dropping the torch.
It flickered, but didn’t go out, and I snatched it up again, waving it to encourage the flame. The flame rose and steadied, shedding a ruddy glow on Jocasta, who stood on the path behind us, ghostly in her white nightgown. Phaedre huddled behind her mistress, no more of her face visible than the brief shine of eyes in the darkness. The eyes looked scared, flicking from Jamie and me to the dark hole in the facade of the mausoleum.
“What am I doing? Disposing of Lieutenant Wolff, what else?” Jamie, who had been as startled as I had by his aunt’s sudden appearance, sounded a little cross. “Leave it to me, Aunt. Ye needna concern yourself.”
“You are not—no, ye mustn’t open Hector’s tomb!” Jocasta’s long nose twitched, obviously picking up the scent of decay—which was faint, but distinct.
“Dinna fash yourself, Aunt,” Jamie said. “Go back to the house. I’ll manage. It will all be well.”
She ignored his soothing words, advancing blindly over the walk, hands groping in the empty air.
“No, Jamie! Ye mustn’t. Close it up again. Close it, for God’s sake!”
The panic in her voice was unmistakable, and I saw Jamie frown in confusion. He looked uncertainly from his aunt to the hole in the mausoleum. The wind had dropped, but now rose in a small gust, wafting a much stronger scent of death around us. Jamie’s face changed, and ignoring his aunt’s cries of protest, he knocked loose more blocks with several quick blows of the padded hammer.
“Bring the torch, Sassenach,” he said, setting down the hammer, and with a sense of creeping horror, I did so.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, peering through the narrow gap in the blocks. Two coffins of polished wood stood inside, each on a pedestal of marble. And on the floor between them . . .
“Who is he, Aunt?” Jamie’s voice was quiet as he turned to speak to her.
She stood as if paralyzed, the muslin of her gown flapping round her legs in the wind, pulling strands of white hair from beneath her cap. Her face was frozen, but the blind eyes darted to and fro, seeking an impossible escape.
Jamie stepped forward and grabbed her fiercely by the arm, making her start from her frozen trance.
“Co a th’ann?” he growled. “Who is he? Who?”
Her mouth worked, trying to form words. She stopped, swallowed, tried again, eyes still flickering to and fro over his shoulder, looking at God knew what. Had she still been able to see when they put him in there? I wondered. Did she see it now, in memory?
“His name—his name was Rawlings,” she said faintly, and something inside my chest fell like an iron weight.
I must have moved or made some sound, for Jamie’s eyes went to me. He reached out a hand for mine, and held on tightly, though his eyes went back to Jocasta.
“How?” he asked, calmly, but with a tone that warned that he would brook no evasion.
She closed her eyes then, and sighed, broad shoulders slumping suddenly.
“Hector killed him,” she said.
“Oh, aye?” Jamie cast a cynical glance at the coffins inside the mausoleum, and the huddled mass that lay on the floor between them. “A good trick, that. I hadna realized my uncle was so capable.”
“Before.” Her eyes opened again, but she spoke dully, as though nothing mattered any longer. “He was a doctor, Rawlings. He’d come to look at my eyes, once before. When Hector took ill, he called the man back. I canna say quite what happened, but Hector caught him nosing round where he should not, and smashed his head in. He was a hot-tempered man, Hector.”
“I should say so,” Jamie said, with another glance at the body of Dr. Rawlings. “How did he get in here?”
“We—he—hid the corpse, meaning to carry it off and leave it in the wood. But then . . . Hector got worse, and couldna leave his bed. Within a day, he was dead, too. And so . . .” She lifted a long white hand, gesturing toward the draft of dank chill that floated from the open tomb.
“Great minds think alike,” I murmured, and Jamie gave me a dirty look, letting go my hand. He stood contemplating the stillness inside the violated mausoleum, thick brows drawn down in a frown of concentration.
“Oh, aye?” he said again. “Whose is the second coffin?”
“Mine.” Jocasta was recovering her nerve; her shoulders straightened and her chin lifted.
Jamie made a small puffing noise and glanced at me. I could believe that Jocasta would callously leave a dead man to lie exposed, rather than put him in her own pristine coffin . . . and yet. To do so drastically increased the odds of discovery, slim as those might be.
No one would have opened Jocasta’s coffin until it was time to receive her own body; Dr. Rawlings’ corpse could have lain there in complete safety, even were the mausoleum to be opened for some reason. Jocasta Cameron was selfish—but by no means stupid.
“Put Wolff in, then, if you must,” she said. “He can lie on the floor with the other one.”
“Why not put him in your coffin, Aunt?” Jamie asked, and I saw that he was looking at her intently.
“No!” She had begun to turn away, but at this whipped back, her blind face fierce in the torchlight. “He is dung. Let him lie and rot in the open!”
Jamie narrowed his eyes at her response, but didn’t reply. Instead, he turned to the tomb and began to shift the loosened blocks.
“What are you doing?” Jocasta could hear the grating noise of the shifting marble, and became agitated anew. She turned round on the walk, but became disoriented, staring off toward the river. I realized that she must now be completely blind, unable even to see the light from the torch.
I had no attention to pay her just then, though. Jamie wedged himself through the gap in the blocks, and stepped inside.
“Light me, Sassenach,” he said softly, and his voice echoed slightly in the small stone chamber.
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 hear the faint catch in his voice, the point where he forced air hard through his scarred throat to form the words.
“No.” His hand was on her hair, stroking. “I didn’t ever tell you not to read it.”
His fingers touched her shoulder, lightly, and her toes curled with pleasure at the feeling. Did she mind? No. She supposed she ought to feel exposed in some way, the privacy of her thoughts and dreams laid bare to him—but she trusted him with them. He would never use those things against her.
Besides, once set down on paper, the dreams became a separate thing from her, herself. Much like the drawings that she made; a reflection of one facet of her mind, a brief glimpse of something once seen, once thought, once felt—but not the same thing as the mind or heart that made them. Not quite.
“Fair’s fair, though.” Her chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. He smelled good, bitter and musky with the scent of satisfied desire. “Tell me one of your dreams, then.”
A laugh vibrated through his chest, nearly soundless, but she felt it.
“Only one?”
“Yes, but it has to be an important one. Not the flying ones, or the ones where you’re being chased by a monster, or the ones where you go to school without your clothes on. Not the ones that everybody has—one that only you have.”
One of her hands was on his chest, scratching gently to make the dark curly hairs twitch and rise. The other was under the pillow; if she moved her fingers slightly, she could feel the smooth little shape of the ancient wifie, as he called it. She could imagine her own womb swelling, round and hard. She could feel the clutch and soft spasm in her lower belly; aftershocks of their lovemaking. Would it be this time?
He turned his head on the pillow, thinking. Long lashes lay against his cheek, black as the lines of the trees outside. He turned back then, lifting them, and his eyes were the color of moss, soft and vivid in the shadowed light.
“I could be romantic,” he whispered, and his fingers drifted down her back, so that she felt gooseflesh rise in their wake. “I could say this is my dream—you and me, here alone . . . us and our children.” He turned his head a little, checking the trundle in the corner, but Jemmy was sound asleep, invisible.
“You could,” she echoed, and ducked her head so her forehead pressed against his shoulder. “But that’s a waking dream—not a real dream. You know what I mean.”
“Aye, I do.”
He was quiet for a minute, his hand lying still, broad and warm across the base of her spine.
“Sometimes,” he whispered at last, “sometimes, I dream I am singing, and I wake from it with my throat aching.”
He couldn’t see her face, or the tears that prickled at the corners of her eyes.
“What do you sing?” she whispered back. She heard the shush of the linen pillow as he shook his head.
“No song I’ve ever heard, or know,” he said softly. “But I know I’m singing it for you.”