The Outlander (42 page)

The widow had known many women who did this kind of thing, nattering
energetically over their work, although the usual subject was the shortcomings of other
women. Her grandmother used to call it gassing. Sometimes it was a way to burn off
excess energy, to exhaust a lingering anger by
talking it out.
Sometimes it was a way for an overworked woman to stay awake when her leisure time had
finally come. One simply talked, the way those who stand in the cold will step from foot
to foot. No response was required. A drowsing husband, a cat or a dog, even a playing
baby would do as a confidante. But in this case, the widow could see that something more
urgent was at work. This woman was talking her way around some larger worry. The crochet
hook stabbed anxiously at the little patch of potato-coloured lace, moving too quickly.
The widow noticed that the woman was often obliged to stop and pull out sections and
redo them. “What day of the week is it?” she asked.

“Tuesday the eighth. Already Tuesday. You have two days before the
train comes.”

The woman did not look up when she said this, but her long cheeks were
flushed. The ball of cotton skittered about the skirt, caught between the twin abutments
of her equine legs.

The widow sat on her cot beside her now empty breakfast tray, waiting to
see what was coming, working a finger into the little bullet hole in her pant leg. The
edges of the hole were hardened, burnt to a crust by the heat of the bullet. Her finger
touched the warm skin of her leg. She remembered the bullet whizzing past her cheek, the
smell of her hair burning. John's brothers had come so close to killing her
— and she to killing them. Perhaps now they were even, a balance struck between
two failures.

No murder but the first one. The bang. A mist on the air. Blood pumping
from the meat of his leg, a viscous puddle spreading like honey. The widow yanked her
finger out of the hole in her pantleg. She shook herself.

Her companion was watching her thoughtfully, the lace-work forgotten, the
little blunt hook rolling slowly between her fingers.

“How do you feel?” the woman said. It was not a casual
question.

The widow's heart leaped and she wondered if she had spoken out
loud.

“Are you feeling very sick?”

“Sick?”

The woman inclined her head toward the bedpan that stood at the far end of
the bed, into which the widow had retched that morning. There was nowhere to hide
anything in this barren room.

“How far along are you?” the woman said bluntly.

There was silence for a moment. The widow sighed. Some women can tell,
almost as if they can smell it on you, see it floating about your body like a cloud of
fireflies. “Far enough,” she said.

Of course, she had suspected for some time that she was pregnant.
Suspected but not been sure. She had recognized the feeling: the sore and laden breasts,
the bottomless fatigue, a welcome serenity invading her worried mind. A glimmer forming
in her heart; how grateful she would be to know it was true. This woman, with one
breath, had brought it out of the dream and into the real.

“Oh, my dear,” her companion said, suddenly overcome with
emotion, “what are you going to
do
?”

THE JUDGE'S DOG
clambered up the steps of the
Willow Cane Hotel and trotted straight through the open doors into the lobby like a
paying guest. He did a tour of the armchairs
and chesterfields,
then made for the manager's office, which was already full of people.

“He's here!” shouted the desk clerk.

The widow was sitting up front, next to the manager's desk, with her
wrists tied to the chair's arm and her twin keepers behind her. The dog walked
amiably among the crowd, scenting each pantleg, tail wagging in basic goodwill. A hand
or two reached out to thump him on the back.

Then the judge arrived. He trudged slowly up the steps, his nose in a
handkerchief, leather case under his arm, a short, bespectacled man in rumpled jacket
and a homely knitted scarf. He, too, headed for the office, then turned on impulse and
made for the front desk.

“Tea, please. Very hot, and nothing in it.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he entered the small room, many people were already standing. The
others, the widow included, took the cue and rose as well. He settled himself gingerly
behind the manager's desk, put the case on the floor, and said,
“Come.” The crowd fluttered a little in response, but it was the dog he was
calling, and it came wagging to him, circled a few times, then lay down with a groan.
There was silence as the judge sniffled. He regarded them all with a rheumy gaze —
and one artificial eye. Its colour was a poor match for the other one, and it seemed to
roam of its own accord, to roll and wander.

“All right, sit down,” he said. “Court is in
session.” There was a shuffling and scraping of chairs. He looked at the papers on
the desk for a long time, reading a page, then holding it to his chest while he read the
next. He hung over one page for a long moment, then he looked up at the widow, and his
gaze drifted to the ropes around her wrists, then to the two
big men behind her — one of whom was distinctly green in the face. He went back to
his papers, read a little more, then laid them in a rough pile and put his elbows on
them.

“My name is Justice Ulrich. I am what's called a circuit court
judge, which means I go from town to town hearing cases. This is not a trial today. We
have an arraignment on a charge of murder. What else do we have, Allan?”

Allan had been too busy watching the twins and was caught off guard. He
made a floundering motion before bolting out of his seat, while his peeved wife shifted
her chair away from him, out of harm's way. “They . . . they're not
here yet, Your Honour. We got a man and a woman having a cat-fight over a fence that
runs between their houses. Neither of 'em will back down. Woman says she wants to
sue him for trespassing, and neglect, and whatever else she can think up. The problem
being, they used to be married.”

“Dispute over a fence?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see. Let's say we'll deal with the murder today, and
I'll come back next week to hear all about the fence. How does that sound?”
His eye wandered toward the ceiling, and the audience watched it go.

“Good, good!” Allan said, then sat again, wringing his
hands.

The judge's tea arrived on a silver tray, and there followed a long
interval during which everybody watched him slurp at his cup and blow his nose. The
widow regarded this man with undisguised despair.

“Mrs. Boulton,” he said finally, “do you understand that
you are being charged with murder?”

She nodded slightly.

“Did you kill your husband?” He waited for a long moment,
taking in the closed and hopeless face before him, then went on. “In the absence
of an answer, I must enter your plea as not guilty. Just let me write this out . .
.” He bent over a page and wrote in a quick, graceful hand. Without looking up, he
said, “Everyone will leave the room now, except Mrs. Boulton.” There
followed a short, confused pause, followed by a creaking of the floorboards as the crowd
exited the room. The dog lifted its head only briefly before dropping it again and
closing his eyes.

“Everyone, please,” said the judge. The twins, who had not
moved, rose with reluctance and went to stand in the lobby just outside the door. The
widow could hear murmuring behind her and the scratch of the judge's pen on the
paper. When he was done, he set the pen down and leaned over the table and addressed the
widow in a low voice.

“Someone has been very helpful and written me an anonymous note
saying that you are pregnant.” He put his index finger on one of many crumpled
papers on the desk. “If this is true, it could be in your favour. However, let me
be honest with you. A conviction on murder carries an automatic penalty of death by
hanging, and from what I can see of your case, those two men will have no trouble
getting a conviction. Not least because you confessed to Allan. A jury may look kindly
on an expectant mother. Or not. It's impossible to tell.” Here he leaned
closer to the desktop and lowered his voice even further so that the widow was obliged
to lean toward him, and they sat together in the empty room like conspirators.

“There is a possibility,” he said, “that they will wait
until you have given birth before they execute you.”

The widow's head began to swim. “No,” she said
weakly.

“The child will most likely be taken from you immediately and given
to your brothers-in-law, since they are its next of kin. You may never lay eyes on
it.”

At that, the room began to pulse. She looked into the judge's
bizarre face, his eye almost properly focused on her, and let out a short gasp, a single
syllable of anguish.

“I'm sorry,” he said and sat back, gesturing for the
crowd to come back into the room.

THAT AFTERNOON THERE
drifted through the bars of the
widow's cell a faint taste of dust on the air, and she could hear many voices in
the street and the sound of wagons. The voices came and went, and there would be long
periods of silence before she heard another voice, or the snort of horses and jingle of
their traces, or children laughing and being shushed. The widow sat on her bed or paced
her cell, her face vacant, her eyes constantly welling. Minutes would go by and she had
not a thought in her head, as if all thought had been forced out by the one black,
ghastly fact. Only it resided, only it mattered.
You may never lay eyes on
it.

The day was warm and dry and clear, sun falling through the trees overhead
and moving on the grass in lavish, bright scraps. When she pressed her face to the bars
she could see milling groups of people in the street. Women carried shopping baskets,
their shapes passing vaguely in the shimmering day. Some voices seemed to leap out,
sharp and urgent, the words clear as if they were spoken to the widow herself:
“Never had that happen, did you?” and another voice as
if answering, but it could not be answering: “Fourteen dollars!” She
listened for anything that made sense, but none of it did. The widow sat back on her
cot. After a moment she heard music on the air. There was a band somewhere in town.

Over the next few hours, the voices grew less frequent, and the sense of
people on the road faded, and she now heard no horses, no children, and then it was
quiet and solitary and there came only wisps of music, as if the town itself was slowly
spinning away into space, whatever festivity might be at hand gradually unravelling and
floating away on the wind. Mary lay on her bed as if almost asleep, but her heart was
pounding and her hands cold and numb with panic.
They are its next of kin.

She clawed her way out of the bed and went to the heavy, barred inner
door, put a hand round one of the bars, and gave it a slight push. Nothing. So she
seized it in both hands and gave it a terrific shake. It was so solidly made it did not
rattle or grind or make the slightest sound. She could smell new oil in the brass lock.
She put her face against the bars and looked down the inner hallway, but it was dark and
seemed endless and she could sense nothing beyond it.

THE RIDGERUNNER
came along the uneven crest of the
rock-fall in the moonlight, thumbs in the shoulder straps of his pack, picking his way
carefully over the stones. He stopped to gauge his direction. What he stood on amounted
to a natural dam created by the recent landslide. On his right was a new lake, glassy
and reflecting the night clouds in flat
and eerie greys. To his
left was an expanse of ragged boulders and rocks, a packed mass through which ran
streams and trickles and even jets of water, forcing their way through the loose rock.
Some distance away he could see the original riverbed that stood low and empty now, wide
and slick and strewn with debris, and down its middle ran a scrawny stream, lifeless and
foul-smelling. William Moreland went on scrambling over the boulders as surefooted as a
mountain goat and his shadow went with him, plunging in the crevices.

Soon he gained the far side, where he turned and followed the shoreline
until he came upon the railway tipple that jutted into the water like a dock. Somewhere
beneath the staring surface of this endless water lay metal tracks, and the Ridgerunner
searched for them, even knelt at the edge to peer down into the dark water, but all that
shone back at him were the huge silver sky and the clouds in motion. He rocked his head
to find his own reflection, but could only discern a dark silhouette of mountain, weird
and vacant, and behind that the shimmer of moon and cloud. It was as if this lake held
another more sober world within it, and he could not find himself in it. The silence of
the place was beyond even his considerable experience. He could almost hear his own
heart. It struck him suddenly, ridiculously, that this place would not acknowledge him,
even in reflection. The human world erased in one brutal swipe.

A profound sense of unease invaded the Ridgerunner. He turned and gazed up
at the collapsed and now unrecognizable mountain face, tracking the devastation of the
slide in the moonlight. Finally his excellent eyes picked out a few small lights uphill,
each one a tiny glimmer, perhaps nothing
more than a lantern.
People, alive. And maybe Mary. He hiked his rucksack up and went on uphill, bent and
cautious, a shadow among other shadows.

Several revellers sat in chairs on the platform of McEchern's store,
the dwarf among them, cups of booze held hovering, staring apprehensively into the dark.
They had been carrying on as usual but had fallen silent as something nimble and quiet
approached through the mist and broken trees, over the uneven ground, hopping and
trotting along. The men leaned out of their chairs, or slipped from the trading
post's wooden platform to step a little out into the dark to listen — some
almost eager, as if they awaited a friend. Spending time among the recently dead had
made them thoughtful about what the dark might hold.