it was 1970. A person going back now would—might—end in 1768. There would be time. That was the hell of it; there would be time.
Even if Brianna thought as he did—or if he could convince her—that the past could not be changed, could she live through the next seven years, knowing that the window of opportunity was closing, that her only chance ever to know her father, see her mother again, was disappearing day by day? It was one thing to let them go, not knowing where they were or what had happened to them; it was another to know explicitly, and to do nothing.
He had known Brianna for more than two years, yet been with her for only a few months of that time. And yet, they knew each other very well in some respects. How could they not, having shared such an experience? Then there had been the letters—dozens, two or three or four each week—and the rare brief holidays, spent between enchantment and frustration, that left him aching with need of her.
Yes, he knew her. She was quiet, but possessed of a fierce determination that he thought would not submit to grief without a fight. And while she was cautious, once her mind was made up, she acted with hair-raising dispatch. If she decided to risk the passage, he couldn’t stop her.
His hands closed tight on the wadded towel, and his stomach dropped, remembering the chasm of the circle and the void that had nearly swallowed them. The only thing more terrifying was the thought of losing Brianna before he had ever truly had her.
He’d never lied to her. But the impact of shock and grief was slowly receding as the rudiments of a plan formed in his mind. He stood up and wrapped the towel around his waist.
One letter wouldn’t do it. It would have to be slow, a process of suggestion, of gentle discouragement. He thought it wouldn’t be difficult; he had found almost nothing in a year of searching in Scotland, beyond the report of the burning of Fraser’s print shop in Edinburgh—he shuddered involuntarily at the thought of flames. Now he knew why, of course; they must have emigrated soon after, though he had found no trace of them on the ship’s rolls he had searched.
Time to give up, he would suggest. Let the past rest—and the dead bury the dead. To keep on looking, in the face of no evidence, would border on obsession. He would suggest, very subtly, that it was unhealthy, this looking back—now it was time to look forward, lest she waste her life in futile searching. Neither of her parents would have wanted that.
The room was chilly, but he barely noticed.
I’ll take care of you, he’d said, and meant it. Was suppressing a dangerous truth the same as lying? Well, if it was, then he’d lie. To give consent to do wrong was a sin, he’d heard that from his early days. That was all right, he’d risk his soul for her, and willingly.
He rummaged in the drawer for a pen. Then he stopped, bent, and reached two fingers into the pocket of his sopping jeans. The paper was frayed and soggy, half disintegrating already. With steady fingers, he tore it into tiny pieces, disregarding the cold sweat that ran in trickles from his face.
23
THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN
I had told Jamie that I didn’t mind being far from civilization; wherever there were people, there would be work for a healer.
Duncan had been good as his word, returning in the spring of 1768 with eight former Ardsmuir men and their families, ready to take up homesteading on Fraser’s Ridge, as the place was now known. With some thirty souls to hand, there was an immediate call on my mildly rusty services, to stitch up wounds and treat fevers, to lance abscessed boils and scrape infected gums. Two of the women were pregnant, and it was my joy to deliver healthy children, a boy and a girl, both born in early spring.
My fame—if that’s the word—as a healer soon spread outside our tiny settlement, and I found myself called farther and farther afield, to tend the ills of folk on isolated hill farms scattered over thirty miles of wild mountain terrain. In addition, I made rare visits with Ian to Anna Ooka to see Nayawenne, returning with baskets and jars of useful herbs.
At first, Jamie had insisted that he or Ian must go with me to the farther places, but it was soon apparent that neither of them could be spared; it was time for the first planting, with ground to break and harrow, corn and barley to be planted, to say nothing of the usual chores required to keep a small farm running. In addition to the horses and mules, we had acquired a small flock of chickens, a depraved-looking black boar to meet the social needs of the pig, and—luxury of luxuries—a milch goat, all of whom required to be fed and watered and generally kept from killing themselves or being eaten by bears or panthers.
So more and more often I went alone when some stranger appeared suddenly in the dooryard, asking for healer or midwife. Daniel Rawlings’s casebook began to acquire new entries, and the larder was enriched by the gifts of hams and venison haunches, bags of grain and bushels of apples, with which my patients repaid my attentions. I never asked for payment, but something was always offered—and poor as we were, anything at all was welcome.
My backcountry patients came from many places, and many spoke neither English nor French; there were German Lutherans, Quakers, Scots and Scotch-Irish, and a large settlement of Moravian brethren at Salem, who spoke a peculiar dialect of what I thought was Czechoslovakian. I usually managed, though; in most cases, someone could interpret for me, and at the worst, I could fall back on the language of hand and body—“Where does it hurt?” is easy to understand in any tongue.
* * *
August 1768
I was chilled to the bone. Despite my best efforts to keep the cloak wrapped tightly round me, the wind ripped it from my body, and sent it billowing like sail canvas. It beat round the head of the boy walking next to me, and jerked me sideways in my saddle with the force of the gale. The rain drove in beneath the flapping folds like frozen needles, and I was soaked through gown and petticoats before we reached Mueller’s Creek.
The creek itself was boiling past, uprooted saplings, rocks and drowned branches bubbling briefly to the surface.
Tommy Mueller peered at the torrent, shoulders hunched nearly to the brim of the slouch hat he wore pulled down over his ears. I could see doubt etched in every line of his body, and bent close to shout in his ear.
“Stay here!” I bellowed, pitching my voice below the shriek of the wind.
He shook his head, mouthing something at me, but I couldn’t hear. I shook my own head vigorously, and pointed up the bank; the muddy soil was crumbly here; I could see small chunks of the black dirt melt away even as I watched.
“Get back!” I shouted.
He pointed emphatically himself—back in the direction of the farmhouse—and reached for my reins. Clearly he thought it was too dangerous; he wanted me to come back to the house, to wait out the storm.
He definitely had a point. On the other hand, I could see the stream widening, even as I watched, the ravenous water eating away the soft bank in gobbets and chunks. Wait much longer, and no one could cross—neither would it be safe for days after; floods like this kept the water high for as long as a week, as the rains from higher up the mountain trickled down to feed the torrents.
The thought of being cooped up in a four-room house for a week with all ten Muellers was enough to spur me to recklessness. Pulling the reins from Tommy’s grasp, I wheeled about, the horse tossing its head against the rain, stepping carefully on the slick mud.
We reached the upper slopes of the bank, where a layer of thick dead leaves gave better footing. I turned the horse, motioned Tommy back out of the way, and leaned forward like a steeplechaser, elbows digging into the bag of barley bound over the saddle in front of me—my payment for services rendered.
The shift of my weight was enough; the horse was no more anxious to hang about here than I was. I felt the sudden thrust as the hindquarters dropped and bunched, and then we were flying down the slope like a runaway toboggan. A jolt and a moment of giddy freefall, then a resounding splash, and I was up past my thighs in freezing water.
My hands were so cold, they might as well
have been welded to the reins, but I had nothing useful to offer in terms of guidance. I let my arms go slack, giving the horse his head. I could feel huge muscles moving rhythmically under my legs as it swam, and the even more powerful shove of the water rushing past us. It dragged at my skirts, threatening to pull me off into the surge.
Then came the jar and scrabble of hooves against the stream bottom, and we were out, pouring water like a colander. I turned in the saddle, to see Tommy Mueller on the other side, his jaw hanging open under his hat. I couldn’t let go of the reins to wave, but bowed toward him ceremoniously, then nudged the horse with my heels and turned toward home.
The hood of my cloak had fallen back when we jumped, but it made no great difference; I couldn’t get much wetter. I knuckled a wet strand of hair out of my eyes and turned the horse’s head toward the upland trail, relieved to be headed home, rain or no.
I had been at the Muellers’ cabin for three days, seeing eighteen-year-old Petronella through her first labor. It would be her last, too, according to Petronella. Her seventeen-year-old husband, peeking tentatively into the room in the middle of the second day, had received a burst of German invective from Petronella that sent him stumping back to the men’s refuge in the barn, ears bright red with mortification.
Still, a few hours later, I had seen Freddy—looking much younger than seventeen—kneel tentatively by his wife’s bedside, face whiter than her shift as he reached a hesitant, scrubbed finger to push aside the blanket covering his daughter.
He stared dumbly at the round head, furred with soft black, then looked at his wife, as though in need of prompting.
“Ist sie nicht wunderschön?” Petronella said softly.
He nodded, slowly, then laid his head on her lap and began to cry. The women had all smiled kindly, and gone back to fixing dinner.
It had been a good dinner, too; the food was one of the benefits of house calls to the Muellers. Even now, my stomach was comfortably distended with dumplings and fried Blutwurst, and the lingering taste of buttered eggs in my mouth provided some small distraction from the general discomfort of my present situation.
I hoped that Jamie and Ian had managed something adequate to eat in my absence. This being the end of summer but not yet harvest time, the pantry shelves were nowhere near the height of what I hoped would be their autumn bounty, but still there were cheeses on the shelf, a huge stoneware crock of salted fish on the floor, and sacks of flour, corn, rice, beans, barley, and oatmeal.
Jamie could in fact cook—at least so far as dressing game and roasting it over a fire—and I had done my best to initiate Ian into the mysteries of making oatmeal parritch, but, they being men, I suspected that they hadn’t bothered, choosing instead to survive on raw onions and dried meat.
I couldn’t tell whether it was simply that after a day spent in the manly pursuits of chopping down trees, plowing fields, and carrying deer carcasses over mountains, they honestly were too exhausted to think of assembling a proper meal, or whether they did it on purpose, so that I would feel necessary.
The wind had dropped, now that I was in the shelter of the ridge, but the rain was still pelting down, and the footing was treacherous, as the mud of the trail had liquified, leaving a layer of fallen leaves floating on top, deceptive as quicksand. I could feel the horse’s discomfort as its hooves slipped with each step.
“Good boy,” I said soothingly. “Keep it up, that’s a good fellow.” The horse’s ears pricked slightly, but he kept his head down, stepping carefully.
“Slewfoot?” I said. “How’s that?”
The horse had no name at the moment—or rather he did, but I didn’t know what it was. The man from whom Jamie had bought him had called him by a German word that Jamie said was not at all suitable for a lady’s horse. When I had asked him to translate the word, he had merely compressed his lips and looked Scottish, from which I deduced that it must be pretty bad. I had meant to ask old Mrs. Mueller what it meant, but had forgotten, in the haste of leaving.
In any case, Jamie’s theory was that the horse would reveal his true—or at least speakable—name in the course of time, and so we were all watching the animal, in hopes of discerning its character. On the basis of a trial ride, Ian had suggested Coney, but Jamie had merely shaken his head and said, no, that wasn’t it.
“Twinkletoes?” I suggested. “Lightfoot? Damn!”
The horse had come to a full stop, for obvious reasons. A small freshet gurgled merrily down the hill, bounding from rock to rock with gay abandon. It was beautiful, the rushing water clear as crystal over dark rock and green leaves. Unfortunately, it was also bounding over the remains of the trail, which, unequal to the force of events, had slithered off the face of the hill into the valley below.
I sat still, dripping. There wasn’t any way around. The hill rose nearly perpendicularly on my right, shrubs and saplings poking out of a cracked rock face, and declined so precipitously to the left that going down would have amounted to suicide. Swearing under my breath, I backed the nameless horse and turned around.
If it hadn’t been for the flooded creek, I would have gone back to the Muellers and let Jamie and Ian fend for themselves a bit longer. As it was, I had no choice; it was find another way home or stay here and drown.
Wearily, we retraced our slogging steps. Less than a quarter-mile from the washout, though, I found a spot where the hillside fell away into a small saddle, a depression between two “horns” of granite. Such formations were common; there was a big one on a nearby mountain, which had gained it the name of Devil’s Peak. If I could cross the saddle to the other side of the hill, and pick my way along it, I would in time come back to the trail where it crossed the ridge to the south.
From the saddle I had a momentary clear view of the foothills, and the blue hollow of the valley beyond. On the other side, though, clouds hid the tops of the mountains, black with rain, suffused with an occasional flicker of hidden lightning.
The wind had dropped, now that the leading edge of the storm had passed. The rain was coming down even more heavily, if such a thing was possible, and I stopped long enough to pry my cold fingers off the reins and put up the hood of my cloak.
The footing on this side of the hill was fair, the ground being rocky but not too steep. We picked our way through small groves of red-berried mountain ash and larger stands of oak. I noted the location of a huge blackberry bramble for future reference, but didn’t stop. I would be lucky to get home by dark as it was.
To distract myself from the cold trickles running down my neck, I began an mental inventory of the pantry. What could I make for dinner, once I arrived?
Something quick, I thought, shivering, and something hot. Stew would take too long; so would soup. If there was squirrel or rabbit, we might have it fried, rolled in egg and cornmeal batter. Or if not that, perhaps brose with a little bacon for flavoring, and a couple of scrambled eggs with green onions.
I ducked, wincing. Despite the hood and the thickness of my hair, the raindrops were beating on my scalp like hail pellets.
Then I realized that they were hail pellets. Tiny white spheres pinged off the horse’s back, and rattled through the oak leaves. Within seconds, the pellets were bigger, the size of marbles, and the hail had grown heavy enough that its popping sounded like machine-gun fire on the wet mats of leaves in the clearings.
The horse flung up its head, shaking its mane vigorously in an effort to escape the stinging pellets. Hastily, I reined in and guided it into the semi-shelter of a huge chestnut tree. Underneath, it was noisy, but the hail slid off the thick canopy of leaves, leaving us protected.
“Right,” I said. With some difficulty, I pried one hand off the reins and gave the horse a reassuring pat. “Easy, then. We’ll be all right, as long as we don’t get struck by lightning.”
Evidently this statement had jogged someone’s memory; a silent fork of dazzling light split the black sky beyond Roan Mountain. A few moments later, the dull rumble of thunder c
ame booming up the hollow, drowning out the rasp of hail on the leaves overhead.
Sheet lightning shimmered far away, across the mountains. Then more bolts, sizzling across the sky, each succeeded by a louder roll of thunder. The hailstorm passed, and the rain resumed, pelting down as hard as ever. The valley below disappeared in cloud and mist, but the lightning lit the stark mountain ridges like bones on an X ray.
“One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopot—” BWOOOM! The horse jerked its head and stamped nervously.
“I know just how you feel,” I told it, peering down the valley. “Steady, though, steady.” There it went again, a flash that lit the dark ridge and left the silhouette of the horse’s pricked ears imprinted on my retinas.
“One hippopotamus, two hippo—” I could have sworn the ground shook. The horse let out a high-pitched scream and reared against my pull on the reins, hooves thrashing in the leaves. The air reeked of ozone.
Flash.
“One,” I said through my teeth. “Damn you, whoa! One hip—”
Flash.
“One—”
Flash.
“Whoa! WHOA!”
I wasn’t conscious of the fall at all; nor even the landing. One moment I was sawing at the reins, a thousand pounds of panicked horse going to pieces under me, shying in all directions. The next, I was lying on my back, blinking up at a spinning black sky, trying to will my diaphragm to work.
Echoes of the shock of impact wavered through my flesh, and I tried frantically to fit myself back into my body. Then I drew breath, a painful gasp, and found myself shaking, the shock turning to the first intimations of damage.
I lay still, eyes closed, concentrating on breathing, conducting an inventory. The rain was still pounding down onto my face, puddling in my eye sockets and running down into my ears. My face and hands were numb. My arms moved. I could breathe a little easier now.
My legs. The left one hurt, but not in any threatening way; only a bruised knee. I rolled heavily onto my side, impeded by my wet, bulky garments. Still, it was the heavy clothing that had saved me from serious damage.
Above me came an uncertain whinny, audible amid the booming thunder. I looked up, dizzy, and saw the horse’s head, protruding from a thicket of buckbrush some thirty feet overhead. Below the thicket, a steep, rocky slope fell away; a long scrape mark toward the bottom showed where I had struck and rolled before ending up in my present position.
We had been standing virtually on the edge of this small precipice without my seeing it, screened as it was by the heavy growth of shrubs. The horse’s panic had sent it to the edge, but evidently it had sensed the danger and caught itself before going over—not before letting me slide off into space, though.
“You bloody bugger!” I said. And wondered whether the unknown German name meant something similar. “I could have broken my neck!” I wiped the mud from my face with a hand that still shook, and looked about me for a way back up.
There wasn’t one. Behind me, the rocky cliff face continued, merging into one of the granite horns. Before me, it ended abruptly, in a plunge straight downward into a small hollow. The slope I stood on declined into this hollow as well, rolling down through clumps of yellow-wood and sumac to the banks of a small creek some sixty feet below.
I stood quite still, trying to think. No one knew where I was. I didn’t know exactly where I was, come to that. Worse, no one would be looking for me for some time. Jamie would think I was still at Muellers’ because of the rain. The Muellers would of course have no reason to think I hadn’t made it safely home; even if they had doubts, they couldn’t follow me, because of the flooded creek. And by the time anyone found the washed-out trail, any traces of my passage would long since have been obliterated by the rain.
I was uninjured, that was something. I was also afoot, alone, without food, moderately lost, and thoroughly wet. About the only certainty was that I wasn’t going to die of thirst.
The lightning was still glancing to and fro like dueling pitchforks in the sky above, though the thunder had faded to a dull rumble in the distance. I had no particular fear of being struck by lightning now—not with so many better candidates standing about, in the form of gigantic trees—but finding shelter seemed a very good idea nonetheless.
It was still raining; drops rolled off the end of my nose with monotonous regularity. Limping on my bruised knee and swearing quite a bit, I made my way down the slippery slope to the edge of the stream.
This creek, too, was swollen by the rain; I could see the tops of drowned bushes sticking out of the water, leaves trailing limply in the rushing current. There was no bank to speak of; I fought my way through the grasping claws of holly and red-cedar toward the rocky cliff-face to the south; perhaps there would be a cave or hollow there that would offer shelter of a sort.
I found nothing but tumbled rocks, black with wet and hard to navigate. Some distance beyond, though, I saw something else that offered a small possibility of shelter.
A huge red cedar tree had fallen across the stream, its roots undermined as the water ate away the soil in which it stood. It had fallen away from me and struck the cliff, so that the thick crown sprawled into the water and over the rocks, the trunk canted across the stream at a shallow angle; on my side, I could see the huge mat of its exposed roots, a bulwark of cracked earth and small bushes heaved up about them. The cavity under them might not be complete shelter, but it looked better than standing in the open or crouching in the bushes.
I hadn’t even paused to think that the shelter might have attracted bears, catamounts, or other unfriendly fauna. Fortunately, it hadn’t.
It was a space about five feet long and five wide, dank, dark, and clammy. The ceiling was composed of the tree’s great gnarled roots, packed with sandy earth, like the roof of a badger’s sett. But it was a solid ceiling, for all that; the floor of churned earth was damp but not muddy, and for the first time in hours rain was not drumming on my skull.
Exhausted, I crawled into the farthest corner, set my wet shoes beside me, and went to sleep. The cold of my wet clothes made me dream vividly, in jumbled visions of blood and childbirth, trees and rocks and rain, and I woke frequently, in that half-conscious way of utter tiredness, falling asleep again in seconds.
I dreamt that I was giving birth. I felt no pain, but saw the emerging head as though I stood between my own thighs, midwife and mother both together. I took the naked child in my arms, still smeared with the blood that came from both of us, and gave her to her father. I gave her to Frank, but it was Jamie who took the caul from her face and said, “She’s beautiful.”
Then I woke and slept, finding my way among boulders and waterfalls, urgently seeking something I had lost. Woke and slept, pursued through woods by something fearsome and unknown. Woke and slept, a knife in my hand, red with blood—but whose, I did not know.
I woke all the way to the smell of burning, and sat bolt upright. The rain had stopped; it was the silence that wakened me, I thought. The smell of smoke