ROGER THOUGHT that the good doctor might be about to suffer an apoplexy, if that was the correct medical term for “blow a gasket.” Whatever his own feelings about the abrupt departure of Buck and Geillis—and those were vivid—they paled beside the hue of Hector McEwan’s face.
The doctor was panting slightly, his complexion puce. Plainly he wanted to follow the errant pair but just as clearly was constrained by the fact that he had no idea what he might conceivably do when he caught up with them.
“It’s not what you think,” Roger said, commending his soul to God and hoping that it wasn’t.
McEwan swung round to glare at him. “The devil it’s not,” he snapped. “You don’t know her.”
“Plainly not as well as you do, no,” Roger said pointedly, and raised one brow.
McEwan said something blasphemous in reply, took up the poker, and stabbed viciously at the smoking bricks of peat in the hearth. He half-turned toward the door, the poker still in his hand, and the look on his face was such that Roger leapt to his feet and grabbed him by the arm.
“Stop, man,” he said, keeping his voice pitched as low and evenly as he could, in hopes of soothing McEwan. “Ye’ll do yourself no good. Sit down, now. I’ll tell ye why it—why he—why the man’s interested in her.”
“For the same reason every dog in the village is interested in a bitch in heat,” McEwan said venomously. But he let Roger take the poker from his hand, and while he wouldn’t sit down, he did at least take several deep breaths that restored a semblance of calm.
“Aye, tell me, then—for all the good it will do,” he said.
It wasn’t a situation that allowed for diplomacy or euphemism.
“She’s his mother, and he knows it,” Roger said bluntly.
Whatever McEwan had been expecting, that wasn’t it, and for an instant, Roger was gratified to see the man’s face go absolutely blank with shock. Only for an instant, though. It was likely going to be a tricky bit of pastoral counseling, at best.
“Ye know what he is,” Roger said, taking the doctor by the arm again and pulling him toward a brocaded wing chair. “Or, rather, what we are. Cognosco te?”
“I—” McEwan’s voice died, though he opened and closed his mouth a few times, helplessly looking for words.
“Aye, I know,” Roger said soothingly. “It’s difficult. But ye do know, don’t ye?”
“I—yes.” McEwan sat down abruptly. He breathed for a moment, blinked once or twice, and looked up at Roger.
“His mother. His mother?”
“I have it on good authority,” Roger assured him. A thought struck him, though.
“Ah . . . ye did know about her, didn’t ye? That she’s . . . one of us?”
McEwan nodded. “She’s never admitted it. Just—just laughed at me when I told her where I’d come from. And I didn’t know for a long time. Not until I—” His lips clamped abruptly into a tight line.
“I’m guessing ye didn’t have occasion to heal her of anything,” Roger said carefully. “Does she . . . er . . . has it got anything to do with blue light, by chance?”
He was trying hard to avoid the mental picture of Geillis and Dr. McEwan, naked and sweating, both bathed in a faint blue glow. The woman was his several-times great-grandmother, whatever else you liked to say about her.
McEwan gave him a bleak look and shook his head.
“Not . . . exactly. She’s a very fine herbalist and not bad at diagnosis, but she can’t—do that.” He twiddled his fingers briefly in illustration, and Roger felt a faint memory of the warmth when McEwan had touched his throat.
The doctor sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.
“No point in evasion, I suppose. I got her with child. And I could—‘see’ is not quite the right word, but I can’t think of a better one. I could see the moment when my . . . seed . . . reached her ovum. The . . . er . . . the fetus. It glowed inside her womb; I could sense it when I touched her.”
A certain heat rose in Roger’s face. “Forgive me for asking, but—how do you know that happened because she’s . . . what she is? Might it not be the case with a normal woman?”
McEwan smiled—very bleakly—at the word “normal,” and shook his head.
“I had two children by a woman in Edinburgh, in—in my own time,” he said quietly, and looked down at his feet. “That . . . was one of the reasons I didn’t try to return.”
Roger made a sound in his damaged throat that was meant to be regretful and compassionate, but whether his feelings or his larynx had got the better of him, it emerged as a rather stern “Hrmph!” and McEwan’s color began to rise again.
“I know,” he said wretchedly. “I don’t seek to—to excuse it.”
Just as well, Roger thought. I’d like to see ye try, you—you— But recriminations would do no one any good just now, and he stifled whatever else he might have said on the subject, instead returning to Geillis.
“Ye said ye got her”—jerking his chin upward, to where the sounds of footsteps and bumpings were audible overhead—“with child. Where is the child?”
McEwan drew a long, trembling breath. “I said . . . she is a very fine herb-alist . . . ?”
“Jesus, Lord,” Roger said. “Did ye know she meant to do it?”
McEwan swallowed audibly, but kept silent.
“My God,” Roger said.
“My God. I know it’s not my place to judge you—but if it was, man, you’d burn in hell.”
And with that, he went downstairs and out into the streets of Cranesmuir, leaving the lot of them to their own devices.
HE’D MADE SIXTEEN circuits of the village square—it was a small square—before getting a precarious hold on his sense of outrage. He stood in front of the Duncans’ front door, fists clenched, taking deep, deliberate breaths.
He had to go back. You didn’t walk away from people who were drowning, even if they’d jumped into a quagmire on purpose. And he didn’t want to think what might happen if McEwan, left to himself, should be overcome by anguish or fury and rush in on the pair in the attic. He really didn’t want to think what Buck—or, God forbid, Geillis—might do in that case, and the thought galvanized him.
He didn’t trouble knocking. Arthur Duncan was the procurator fiscal; his door was always open. The wee maid poked her head out of an inner door at the sound of his footsteps, but when she saw who he was, she drew it in again, doubtless thinking he’d just stepped out for something.
He nearly sprinted up the stair, a guilty conscience now furnishing him with visions of Hector McEwan hanging from the small chandelier in the parlor, helpless feet kicking in the air.
When he burst in, though, he found McEwan slumped forward in the wing chair, face buried in his hands. He didn’t look up at Roger’s entrance and wouldn’t raise his head even when Roger shook him gently by the shoulder.
“Come on, man,” he said gruffly, then cleared his throat. “Ye’re still a doctor, aren’t ye? Ye’re needed.”
That made the man look up, startled. His face was mottled with emotion—anger, shame, desolation, lust. Could lust be an emotion? Roger wondered briefly, but dismissed the consideration as academic at the moment. McEwan straightened his shoulders and rubbed both hands hard over his face, as though trying to erase the feelings so plainly displayed there.
“Who needs me?” he said, and rose to his feet with a decent attempt at composure.
“I do,” Roger said, and cleared his throat again, with a noise like falling gravel. It felt like gravel, too; strong emotion choked him, literally. “Come outside, aye? I need air, and so do you.”
McEwan cast one last look up at the ceiling, where the noises had now ceased, then firmed his lips, nodded, and, taking up his hat from the table, came along.
Roger led the way out of the square and past the last house, then up a cow path, dodging heaps of manure, until they reached a drystane wall that they could sit upon. He sat down himself and gestured to McEwan, who sat obediently. The walk had lent the doctor some semblance of calm, and he turned at once to Roger and spread open his collar—this still flapping loose. Roger felt the ghost of Geillis Duncan’s touch on his throat and shivered, but it was cold out, and McEwan took no notice.
The doctor wrapped his fingers loosely around the scar and seemed to listen for a moment, head to one side. Then he pulled his hand back a little and felt delicately up higher with two probing fingers, then lower, a small frown of concentration on his face.
And Roger felt it. The same odd sensation of light warmth. He’d been holding his breath under the doctor’s touch, but at this realization he exhaled suddenly—and freely.
“Jesus,” he said, and put his own hand to his throat. The word had come freely, too.
“It’s better?” McEwan was looking at him intently, his earlier upset subsumed in professional concern.
“It . . . is.” The scar was still bumpy under his fingers, but something had changed. He cleared his throat experimentally. A little pain, a little blockage—but noticeably better. He lowered his hand and stared at McEwan. “Thank you. What the bloody hell did you do?”
The tension that had been twanging through McEwan since Roger and Buck had entered the Duncans’ house finally eased, just as the tightness in Roger’s throat had.
“I don’t know that I can tell you with any great precision,” he said apologetically. “It’s just that I know what a sound larynx should feel like, and I can tell what yours feels like, and . . .” He shrugged a little, helpless. “I put my fingers there and . . . envision the way it should feel.”
He touched Roger’s throat gently again, exploring. “I can tell that it’s very slightly better now. But there is a good deal of damage. I can’t say whether it would ever be completely healed—in all truth, I doubt it. But if I were to repeat the treatment—it seems to need some time between treatments, no doubt for the tissue to heal, just as an external wound would. So far as I can tell, the optimum time between treatments of a serious injury is about a month; Geillis—” And here his face twitched violently; he had forgotten. He mastered himself with an effort, though, and went on, “Geillis thinks that the process may be affected by the phase of the moon, but she is . . .”
“A witch,” Roger finished for him.
The look of unhappiness had returned to McEwan’s face, and he lowered his head to hide it.
“Perhaps,” he said softly. “Surely she is . . . an unusual woman.”
“And a good thing for the human race that there aren’t more like her,” Roger said, but then checked himself. If he could pray for Jack Randall’s immortal soul, he couldn’t do less for his own great-grandmother, homicidal maniac or not. But the immediate problem was to try to extract the hapless soul before him from her clutches before she could destroy Hector McEwan utterly.
“Dr. McEwan . . . Hector,” he said softly, and laid a hand on the doctor’s arm. “You need to go right away from this place, and from her. She won’t merely bring you great unhappiness or imperil your soul—she may well kill you.”
A look of surprise momentarily displaced the unhappiness in McEwan’s eyes. He looked aside, pursed his mouth, and glanced back at Roger, side-long, as though afraid to look at him too directly.
“Surely you exaggerate,” he said, but the words had no force. McEwan’s own Adam’s apple bobbed visibly as he swallowed.
Roger drew a deep, unconstricted breath and felt the cold, damp air fresh in his chest.
“No,” he said gently. “I don’t. Think about it, aye? And pray, if ye can. There is mercy, aye? And forgiveness.”
McEwan sighed, too, but not with any sense of freedom in it. He cast his eyes down, fixed them on the muddy lane and the rain-dancing puddles in the low spots.
“I cannot,” he said, his voice low and hopeless. “I’ve . . . tried. I can’t.”
Roger’s hand was still on McEwan’s arm. He squeezed, hard, and said, “Then I’ll pray for ye. And for her,” he added, hoping no reluctance showed in his voice.
“Thank you, sir,” the doctor said. “I value that extremely.” But his eyes had lifted and turned, as though he had no power over them, toward Cranesmuir and its smoking chimneys, and Roger knew there was no hope.