An Echo in the Bone (142 page)

Mrs. Graham had died peacefully in her sleep years before—but had left her knowledge, and her role as caller, to her granddaughter, Fiona.

Fiona had helped Roger when he came through the stones to find Brianna—even contributing her own diamond engagement ring to help him, after his first attempt had ended much as William Buccleigh described his own: in flames in the center of the circle.

They could get a gemstone without much trouble, she thought, automatically passing the bowl of salad to Roger. From what they knew so far, it didn’t have to be a terribly expensive stone, or even a large one. The garnets in Roger’s mother’s locket had apparently been enough to keep him from being killed during his first, abortive try.

She thought suddenly of the burn mark on William Buccleigh’s chest and, as she did so, realized that she was staring at him—and he was staring back at her. She choked on a chunk of cucumber, and the subsequent hubbub of back-thumping and arm-raising and coughing and water-fetching luckily explained the redness of her face.

Everyone settled back to their food, but she was aware of Roger looking sideways at her. She shot him a brief look under her lashes, with a faint tilt of the head that said,
“Later. Upstairs,”

and he relaxed, resuming a three-way conversation with “Uncle Buck” and Jemmy about trout flies.

She wanted to talk to him about what Buccleigh had said, and decide what to do about him, as soon as possible. She was
not
going to tell him what William Buccleigh had said about Rob Cameron.

ROGER LAY IN BED, watching the moonlight on Brianna’s sleeping face. It was quite late, but he found himself wakeful. Odd, for he usually fell asleep in seconds after making love to her.

Fortunately, she did, too; she had tonight, curling into him like a large, affectionate shrimp before lapsing into naked, warm inertness in his arms.

It had been wonderful—but that wee bit different. She was almost always willing, even eager, and that had been no different, though she’d made a particular point of dead-bolting the bedroom door. He’d installed the dead bolt because Jem had learned to pick locks at the age of seven. It was still bolted, in fact, and seeing that, he slid carefully out from under the covers to unfasten it.

Jem was spending the night with his new best friend, Bobby, but if Mandy needed them in the night, he didn’t want the door locked.

The room was cool, but pleasantly so; they’d put in baseboard heaters, which would be barely adequate to the winter temperatures of the Highlands but fine for late autumn.

Bree slept hot; he’d swear her body temperature rose two or three degrees when she slept, and she often threw off the covers. She lay now, bare to the waist, arms flung over her head and snoring faintly. He cupped a hand absently under his balls, wondering idly whether they might have another go. He thought she wouldn’t mind, but…

But maybe he shouldn’t. When he made love to her, he often took his time and, at the last, was filled with a barbarous delight when she yielded her red-thatched quim—willingly, to be sure, but with an instant always of hesitation, just one final breath of something that was not quite resistance. He thought it was a means of assuring herself—if not him—that she had the right to refuse. A stronghold once breached and repaired has stouter defenses. He didn’t think she realized consciously that she did this; he’d never mentioned it to her, wanting no ghost to rise between them.

It had been a little different tonight. She’d balked more noticeably, then yielded with something like ferocity, pulling him in and raking her nails down his back. And he…

He’d paused for that one instant, but once safely mounted had had the insane urge to pillage ruthlessly, to show himself—if not her—that she was indeed his, and not her own, inviolate.

And she’d egged him on.

He noticed that he hadn’t taken his hand away and was now eyeing his wife like a Roman soldier sizing up one of the Sabine women for weight and portabililty.
Raptio
was the Latin word, usually translated as “rape,” though in fact it meant kidnapping, or seizing.
Raptio
, raptor, the seizing of prey. He could see it both ways, and noticed at this point that he
still
hadn’t actually removed his hand from his genitals, which in the meantime had decided unilaterally that, no, she wouldn’t mind at all.

His cerebral cortex, rapidly being overpowered by something a lot older and much lower down, hazarded a last faint notion that it was to do with having a stranger in the house—especially one like William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

“Well, he’ll be gone by Samhain,” Roger muttered, approaching the bed. The portal in the stones should be wide open then, and with some sort of gem in hand, the bugger ought to be back to his wife in…

He slid beneath the sheets, gathered his own wife up with a firm hand on her very warm bottom, and hissed in her ear, “I’ll get you—and your little dog, too.”

Her body quivered in a soundless subterranean laugh and, eyes closed, she reached down and drew a delicate fingernail up his very sensitive flesh.

“I’m meeeeeeeelllllllting,” she murmured.

HE DID FALL ASLEEP after that. But waked again, somewhere in the wee hours, and found himself annoyingly alert.

It must be him
, he thought, slithering out of bed again.
I’ll not sleep sound until we get rid of
him
. He didn’t bother being careful; he could tell from the faint rasp of Brianna’s snore that she was dead to the world. He pulled his pajamas over his nakedness and stepped out into the upstairs corridor, listening.

Lallybroch talked to itself at night, as all old houses do. He was used to the sudden startling cracks, as wooden beams in the room cooled at night, and even the creaking of the second-floor hallway, as though someone was walking rapidly up and down it. The rattle of windows when the wind was in the west, reminding him comfortably of Brianna’s irregular snoring. It was remarkably quiet now, though, wrapped in the somnolence of deep night.

They’d put William Buccleigh at the far end of the hall, having decided without speaking of it that they didn’t want him above, on the same floor with the kids. Keep him close; keep an eye on him.

Roger walked quietly down the hall, listening. The crack under Buccleigh’s door was dark, and from inside the room, he heard a deep, regular snore, interrupted once as the sleeper turned in bed, muttered something incomprehensible, and dropped back into slumber.

“That’s all right, then,” Roger muttered to himself, and turned away. His cerebral cortex, interrupted earlier, now patiently resumed its train of thought. Of course it was to do with having a stranger in the house—and such a stranger. Both he and Brianna felt obscurely threatened by his presence.

In his own case, there was a solid substratum of anger under the wariness, and a good bit of confusion, too. He had, from sheer necessity as well as religious conviction, forgiven William Buccleigh for his role in the hanging that had taken his voice. After all, the man had not tried to kill him personally and couldn’t have known what would happen.

But it was a damned sight easier to forgive somebody you knew had been dead for two hundred years than it was to maintain that forgiveness with the bastard living under your nose, eating your food, and being charming to your wife and children.

And let us not forget he
is
a bastard, too
, Roger thought savagely, making his way down the stairs in the dark. The family tree he’d shown William Buccleigh MacKenzie revealed him as all correct, pinned down on paper, neatly bracketed by parents and son. The chart was a lie, though.

William Buccleigh MacKenzie was a changeling: the illegitimate offspring of Dougal MacKenzie, war chief of Clan MacKenzie, and Geillis Duncan, witch. And Roger thought William Buccleigh didn’t know it.

Safely at the bottom of the stair, he turned on the light in the lower hall and went to the kitchen to check that the back door was locked.

They’d discussed that one, he and Brianna, but hadn’t come to an agreement yet. He was for letting sleeping dogs lie; what good could it do the man to know the truth of his origins? The Highlands that had spawned those two wild souls was gone, both now and in William Buccleigh’s rightful time.

Bree had insisted that Buccleigh had some right to know the truth—though, challenged, could not say quite what right that was.

“You
are who you think you are, and you always have been,” she’d said at last, frustrated but trying to explain. “I wasn’t. Do you think it would have been better if I’d never
known
who my real father was?”

In all honesty, it might have been, he thought. The knowledge, once revealed, had torn both their lives apart, exposed them both to terrible things. It had taken his voice. Almost taken his life.

Had put her in danger, gotten her raped, been responsible for her having killed a man—he hadn’t spoken to her about that; he should. He saw the weight of it in her eyes sometimes and knew it for what it was. He carried the same weight.

And yet… would he choose
not to
have known what he now knew? Never to have lived in the past, met Jamie Fraser, seen the side of Claire that existed only in Jamie’s company?

It wasn’t the tree of good and evil in the Garden of Eden, after all; it was the tree of the
knowledge
of good and evil. Knowledge might be a poisoned gift—but it was still a gift, and few people would voluntarily give it back. Which was just as well, he supposed, since they
couldn’t
give it back. And that had been
his
point in the discussion.

“We don’t know what harm it could do,” he’d argued. “But we don’t know it
couldn’t
do harm, and serious harm. And what would be the benefit to the man, to know his mother was insane, a sorceress, or both, certainly a multiple murderess, and his father an adulterer and at the least an attempted murderer? It was enough of a shock to
me
when your mother told me about Geillis Duncan, and she’s eight generations removed from me. And before you ask, yes, I could have lived without knowing that.”

She’d bitten her lip at that and nodded, reluctant.

“It’s just—I keep thinking about Willie,” Bree had said at last, giving up. “Not William Buccleigh, I don’t mean—my brother.” She flushed a little, as she always did, self-conscious at speaking the word. “I really wanted him to
know
. But Da and Lord John… they so
didn’t
want him to know, and maybe they were right. He has a life, a good one. And they said he couldn’t keep on having that life if I told him.”

“They were right,” Roger had said bluntly. “To tell him—if he believed it—would force him to live in a state of deceit and denial, which would eat him alive, or to openly acknowledge that he’s the bastard son of a Scottish criminal. Which is Just. Not. On. Not in eighteenth-century culture.”

“They wouldn’t take his title away,” Bree had argued. “Da said that by British law, a child born in wedlock is the legal offspring of the husband, no matter whether the husband was the real father or not.”

“No, but imagine living with a title ye don’t think you’re entitled
to
, knowing the blood in your veins isn’t the blue ye’ve always thought it was. Having people call ye ‘Lord So-and-So’ and knowing what they’d call ye if they knew the truth.” He’d shaken her gently, trying to make her see.

“Either way, it would destroy the life he has, as surely as if you’d set him on a keg of gunpowder and lit the fuse. You wouldn’t know when the bang would come, but come it would.”

“Mmphm,” she’d said, and the argument ended there. But it hadn’t been a sound of agreement, and he knew the argument wasn’t over.

By now he had checked all the doors and windows on the ground floor, ending in his study.

He flipped on the light and came into the room. He was wide awake, nerves on edge.
Why?
he wondered. Was the house trying to tell him something? He snorted a little. Hard not to have fancies, in the middle of the night in an old house, with the wind rattling the windowpanes. And yet he usually felt very comfortable in this room, felt it was his place. What was wrong?

He glanced quickly over the desk, the deep windowsill with the small pot of yellow chrysanthemums that Bree had put there, the shelves—

He stopped dead, heart thumping in his chest. The snake wasn’t there. No, no, it was—his roving eye fixed on it. It was in the wrong place, though. It wasn’t in front of the wooden box that held Claire and Jamie’s letters but sitting in front of the books two shelves below it.

He picked it up, automatically stroking the old polished cherrywood with his thumb. Perhaps Annie MacDonald had moved it? No. She did dust and sweep in the study, but she never moved anything from its place. Never moved anything anywhere, for that matter; he’d seen her pick up a pair of galoshes carelessly left in the middle of the mudroom, sweep carefully under them, and set them back in the same place, mud splashes and all. She would never have moved the snake.

Still less would Brianna have moved it. He knew—without knowing how he knew it—that she felt as he did about it; Willie Fraser’s snake guarded his brother’s treasure.

He was lifting down the box before his train of conscious thought had reached its logical conclusion.

Alarm bells were going off right and left. The contents of the box had been disturbed; the little books were on top of the letters at one end of the box, not underneath. He took out the letters, cursing himself for never having counted them. How would he know if one was missing?

He sorted them quickly, read and unread, and
thought
the unread pile was about the same; whoever had been in the box hadn’t opened them, that was something. But whoever it was had probably wanted to avoid detection, too.

He thumbed hastily through the opened letters and became aware at once that one was missing: the one written on Brianna’s handmade paper with the embedded flowers. The first one. Jesus, what had it said?
We are alive
. He remembered that much. And then Claire had told all about the explosion and the burning of the Big House. Had she said in that one they were going to Scotland? Maybe so. But why in bloody hell should—