Dragonfly in Amber

  “You think you’re not a Frather?” he said, lowering the decanter and exhaling gustily. “Ha!” He leaned back once more, belly rising and falling rapidly as he caught his breath. He pointed a long, skinny finger at Jamie.

  “Your own father thtood right where you’re thstanding, laddie, and told me jutht what you did, the day he left Beaufort Cathtle once and for all.” The old man was growing calmer now; he coughed several times and wiped his face again.

  “Did ye know that I’d tried to thtop your parents’ marriage by claiming that Ellen MacKenzie’s child wathn’t Brian’s?”

  “Aye, I knew.” Jamie was leaning back on the table again, surveying his grandfather through narrowed eyes.

  Lord Lovat snorted. “I’ll not thay there’s been always goodwill atween me and mine, but I know my thons. And my grandthons,” he added pointedly. “De’il take me and I think any one of ’em could be a cuckold, nay more than I could.”

  Jamie didn’t turn a hair, but I couldn’t stop myself from glancing away from the old man. I found myself staring at his discarded teeth, the stained beechwood gleaming wetly amid the cake crumbs. Luckily Lord Lovat hadn’t noticed my slight motion.

  He went on, serious once more. “Now, then. Dougal MacKenzie of Leoch hath declared for Charles. D’ye call him your chief? Is that what ye’re telling me—that ye’ve given him an oath?”

  “No. I havena sworn to anyone.”

  “Not even Charles?” The old man was fast, pouncing on this like a cat on a mouse. I could almost see his tail twitch as he watched Jamie, slanted eyes deep-set and gleaming under crepey lids.

  Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the leaping flames, his shadow motionless on the wall behind him.

  “He hasna asked me.” This was true. Charles had had no need to request an oath from Jamie—having precluded the necessity by signing Jamie’s name to his Bond of Association. Still, I knew that he had not, in fact, given his word to Charles was important to Jamie. If he must betray the man, let it not be as an acknowledged chief. The idea that the entire world thought such an oath existed was a matter of much less concern.

  Simon grunted again. Without his false teeth, his nose and chin came close together, making the lower half of his face oddly foreshortened.

  “Then nothing hampers you to thwear to me, as chief of your clan,” he said quietly. The twitching tail was less visible, but still there. I could almost hear the thoughts in his head, gliding round on padded feet. With Jamie’s loyalty sworn to him, rather than Charles, Lovat’s power would be increased. As would his wealth, with a share of the income from Lallybroch that he might claim as his chieftain’s due. The prospect of a dukedom drew slightly nearer, gleaming through the mist.

  “Nothing save my own will,” Jamie agreed pleasantly. “But that’s some small obstacle, no?” His own eyes creased at the corners as they narrowed further.

  “Mmphm.” Lovat’s eyes were almost closed, and he shook his head slowly from side to side. “Oh, aye, lad, you’re your father’s thon. Thtubborn as a block, and twith ath thtupid. I thould have known that Brian would thire nothing but fools from that harlot.”

  Jamie reached forward and plucked the beechwood teeth from the plate. “Ye’d better put these back, ye auld gomerel,” he said rudely. “I canna understand a word ye say.”

  His grandfather’s mouth widened in a humorless smile that showed the yellowed stump of a lone broken tooth in the lower jaw.

  “No?” he said. “Will ye underthand a bargain?” He shot a quick look at me, seeing nothing more than another counter to be put into play. “Your oath for your wife’s honor, how’s that?”

  Jamie laughed out loud, still holding the teeth in one hand.

  “Oh, aye? D’ye mean to force her before my eyes, then, Grandsire?” He lounged back contemptuously, hand on the table. “Go ahead, and when she’s done wi’ ye, I’ll send Aunt Frances up to sweep up the pieces.”

  His grandfather looked him over calmly. “Not I, lad.” One side of the toothless mouth rose in a lopsided smile as he turned his head to look at me. “Though I’ve taken my pleasure with worthe.” The cold malice in the dark eyes made me want to pull my cloak over my breasts in protection; unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing one.

  “How many men are there in Beaufort, Jamie? How many, who’d be of a mind to put your thathenach wench to the only uth thee’s good for? You cannot guard her night and day.”

  Jamie straightened slowly, the great shadow echoing his movements on the wall. He stared down at his grandfather with no expression on his face.

  “Oh, I think I needna worry, Grandsire,” he said softly. “For my wife’s a rare woman. A wisewoman, ye ken. A white lady, like Dame Aliset.”

  I had never heard of Dame Aliset, but Lord Lovat plainly had; his head jerked round to stare at me, eyes sprung wide with shocked alarm. His mouth drooped open, but before he could speak, Jamie had gone on, an undercurrent of malice clearly audible in his smooth speech.

  “The man that takes her in unholy embrace will have his privates blasted like a frostbitten apple,” he said, with relish, “and his soul will burn forever in hell.” He bared his teeth at his grandfather, and drew back his hand. “Like this.” The beechwood teeth landed in the midst of the fire with a plop, and at once began to sizzle.

  41

  THE SEER’S CURSE

  Most of the Lowland Scots had gone over to Presbyterianism in the two centuries before. Some of the Highland clans had gone with them, but others, like the Frasers and MacKenzies, had kept their Catholic faith. Especially the Frasers, with their strong family ties to Catholic France.

  There was a small chapel in Beaufort Castle, to serve the devotional uses of the Earl and his family, but Beauly Priory, ruined as it was, remained the burying place of the Lovats, and the floor of the open-roofed chancel was paved thick with the flat tombstones of those who lay under them.

  It was a peaceful place, and I walked there sometimes, in spite of the cold, blustery weather. I had no idea whether Old Simon had meant his threat against me, or whether Jamie’s comparing me to Dame Aliset—who turned out to be a legendary “white woman” or healer, the Scottish equivalent of La Dame Blanche—was sufficient to put a stop to that threat. But I thought that no one was likely to accost me among the tombs of extinct Frasers.

  One afternoon, a few days after the scene in the study, I walked through a gap in the ruined Priory wall and found that for once, I didn’t have it to myself. The tall woman I had seen outside Lovat’s study was there, leaning against one of the red-stone tombs, arms folded about her for warmth, long legs thrust out like a stork.

  I made to turn aside, but she saw me, and motioned me to join her.

  “You’ll be my lady Broch Tuarach?” she said, though there was no more than a hint of question in her soft Highland voice.

  “I am. And you’re…Maisri?”

  A small smile lit her face. She had a most intriguing face, slightly asymmetrical, like a Modigliani painting, and long black hair that flowed loose around her shoulders, streaked with white, though she was plainly still young. A seer, hm? I thought she looked the part.

  “Aye, I have the Sight,” she said, the smile widening a bit on her lopsided mouth.

  “Do mind-reading, too, do you?” I asked.

  She laughed, the sound vanishing on the wind that moaned through the ruined walls.

  “No, lady. But I do read faces, and…”

  “And mine’s an open book. I know,” I said, resigned.

  We stood side by side for a time then, watching tiny spatters of fine sleet dashing against the sandstone and the thick brown grass that overgrew the kirkyard.

  “They do say as you’re a white lady,” Maisri observed suddenly. I could feel her watching me intently, but with none of the nervousness that seemed common to such an observation.

  “They do say that,” I agreed.

  “Ah.” She didn’t speak again, just stared down at her feet, long and elegant, stockinged in wool a
nd clad in leather sandals. My own toes, rather more sheltered, were growing numb, and I thought hers must be frozen solid, if she’d been here any time.

  “What are you doing up here?” I asked. The Priory was a beautiful, peaceful place in good weather, but not much of a roost in the cold winter sleet.

  “I come here to think,” she said. She gave me a slight smile, but was plainly preoccupied. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts weren’t overly pleasant.

  “To think about what?” I asked, hoisting myself up to sit on the tomb beside her. The worn figure of a knight lay on the lid, his claymore clasped to his bosom, the hilt forming a cross over his heart.

  “I want to know why!” she burst out. Her thin face was suddenly alight with indignation.

  “Why what?”

  “Why! Why can I see what will happen, when there’s no mortal thing I can be doin’ to change it or stop it? What’s the good of a gift like that? It’s no a gift, come to that—it’s a damn curse, though I havena done anything to be cursed like this!”

  She turned and glared balefully at Thomas Fraser, serene under his helm, with the hilt of his sword clasped under crossed hands.

  “Aye, and maybe it’s your curse, ye auld gomerel! You and the rest o’ your damned family. Did ye ever think that?” she asked suddenly, turning to me. Her brows arched high over brown eyes that sparked with furious intelligence.

  “Did ye ever think perhaps that it’s no your own fate at all that makes you what ye are? That maybe ye have the Sight or the power only because it’s necessary to someone else, and it’s nothing to do wi’ you at all—except that it’s you has it, and has to suffer the having of it. Have you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Or yes, since you say it, I have wondered. Why me? You ask that all the time, of course. But I’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer. You think perhaps you have the Sight because it’s a curse on the Frasers—to know their deaths ahead of time? That’s a hell of an idea.”

  “A hell is right,” she agreed bitterly. She leaned back against the sarcophagus of red stone, staring out at the sleet that sprayed across the top of the broken wall.

  “What d’ye think?” she asked suddenly. “Do I tell him?”

  I was startled.

  “Who? Lord Lovat?”

  “Aye, his lordship. He asks what I see, and beats me when I tell him there’s naught to see. He knows, ye ken; he sees it in my face when I’ve had the Sight. But that’s the only power I’ve got; the power not to say.” The long white fingers snaked out from her cloak, playing nervously with the folds of soaked cloth.

  “There’s always the chance of it, isn’t there?” she said. Her head was bent so that the hood of her cloak shielded her face from my gaze. “There’s a chance that my telling would make a difference. It has, now and then, ye know. I told Lachlan Gibbons when I saw his son-in-law wrapped in seaweed, and the eels stirring beneath his shirt. Lachlan listened; he went out straightaway and stove a hole in his son-in-law’s boat.” She laughed, remembering. “Lord, there was the kebbie-lebbie to do! But when the great storm came the next week, three men were drowned, and Lachlan’s son-in-law was safe at hame, still mending his boat. And when I saw him next, his shirt hung dry on him, and the seaweed was gone from his hair.”

  “So it can happen,” I said softly. “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, nodding, still staring at the ground. Lady Sarah Fraser lay at her feet, the lady’s stone surmounted with a skull atop crossed bones. Hodie mihi cras tibi, said the inscription. Sic transit gloria mundi. My turn today, yours tomorrow. And thus passes away the glory of the world.

  “Sometimes not. When I see a man wrapped in his winding sheet, the illness follows—and there’s naught to be done about that.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. I looked at my own hands, spread on the stone beside me. Without medicine, without instruments, without knowledge—yes, then illness was fate, and naught to be done. But if a healer was near, and had the things to heal with…was it possible that Maisri saw the shadow of a coming illness, as a real—if usually invisible—symptom, much like a fever or a rash? And then only the lack of medical facilities made the reading of such symptoms a sentence of death? I would never know.

  “We aren’t ever going to know,” I said, turning to her. “We can’t say. We know things that other people don’t know, and we can’t say why or how. But we have got it—and you’re right, it’s a curse. But if you have knowledge, and it may prevent harm…do you think it could cause harm?”

  She shook her head.

  “I canna say. If you knew ye were to die soon, are there things you’d do? And would they be good things only that ye’d do, or would ye take the last chance ye might have to do harm to your enemies—harm that might otherwise be left alone?”

  “Damned if I know.” We were quiet for a time, watching the sleet turn to snow, and the blowing flakes whirl up in gusts through the ruined tracery of the Priory wall.

  “Sometimes I know there’s something there, like,” Maisri said suddenly, “but I can block it out of my mind, not look. ’Twas like that with his lordship; I knew there was something, but I’d managed not to see it. But then he bade me look, and say the divining spell to make the vision come clear. And I did.” The hood of her cloak slipped back as she tilted her head, looking up at the wall of the Priory as it soared above us, ochre and white and red, with the mortar crumbling between its stones. White-streaked black hair spilled down her back, free in the wind.

  “He was standing there before the fire, but it was daylight, and clear to see. A man stood behind him, still as a tree, and his face covered in black. And across his lordship’s face there fell the shadow of an ax.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly, but the shiver ran up my spine nonetheless. She sighed at last, and turned to me.

  “Weel, I will tell him, then, and let him do what he will. Doom him or save him, that I canna do. It’s his choice—and the Lord Jesus help him.”

  She turned to go, and I slid off the tomb, landing on the Lady Sarah’s slab.

  “Maisri,” I said. She turned back to look at me, eyes black as the shadows among the tombs.

  “Aye?”

  “What do you see, Maisri?” I asked, and stood waiting, facing her, hands dropped to my sides.

  She stared at me hard, above and below, behind and beside. At last she smiled faintly, nodding.

  “I see naught but you, lady,” she said softly. “There’s only you.”

  She turned and disappeared down the path between the trees, leaving me among the blowing flakes of snow.

  Doom, or save. That I cannot do. For I have no power beyond that of knowledge, no ability to bend others to my will, no way to stop them doing what they will. There is only me.

  I shook the snow from the folds of my cloak, and turned to follow Maisri down the path, sharing her bitter knowledge that there was only me. And I was not enough.

  * * *

  Old Simon’s manner was much as usual over the course of the next two or three weeks, but I imagined that Maisri had kept her intention of telling him about her visions. While he had seemed on the verge of summoning the tacksmen and tenants to march, suddenly he backed off, saying that there was no hurry, after all. This shilly-shallying infuriated Young Simon, who was champing at the bit to go to war and cover himself with glory.

  “It’s not a matter of urgency,” Old Simon said, for the dozenth time. He lifted an oatcake, sniffed at it, and set it down again. “Perhaps we’ll do best to wait for the spring planting, after all.”

  “They could be in London before spring!” Young Simon glowered across the dinner table at his father and reached for the butter. “If ye will not go yourself, then let me take the men to join His Highness!”

  Lord Lovat grunted. “You’ve the Devil’s own impatience,” he said, “but not half his judgment. Will ye never learn to wait?”

  “The time for waiting’s long since past!” Simon burst out. “The C
amerons, the MacDonalds, the MacGillivrays—they’ve all been there since the first. Are we to come meachin’ along at the finish, to find ourselves beggars, and taking second place to Clanranald and Glengarry? Fat chance you’ll have of a dukedom then!”

  Lovat had a wide, expressive mouth; even in old age, it retained some trace of humor and sensuality. Neither was visible at the moment. He pressed his lips tight together, surveying his heir without enthusiasm.

  “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” he said. “And it’s more true when choosing a laird than a lass. A woman can be got rid of.”

  Young Simon snorted and looked at Jamie for support. Over the last two months, his initial suspicious hostility had faded into a reluctant respect for his bastard relative’s obvious expertise in the art of war.

  “Jamie says…” he began.

  “I ken well enough what he says,” Old Simon interrupted. “He’s said it often enough. I shall make up my own mind in my own time. But bear it in mind, lad—when it comes to declaring yourself in a war, there’s little to be lost by waiting.”