I went obediently to look out into the hall. No one was visible, though there were voices coming from a room down the hall—laughter, and tremendous rustlings and thumpings, as young women chattered and rearranged their hair and clothing. I pulled my head back in and closed the door, and the sounds from the rest of the house receded at once, muffled into a distant rumble.

“What is it, then, Auntie?” Jamie was still holding her hand, one big thumb gently stroking the back of it, over and over, in the soothing rhythm I’d seen him use on skittish animals. It was less effective on his aunt than on the average horse or dog, though.

“It was him. He’s here!”

“Who’s here, Auntie?”

“I don’t know!” Her eyes rolled desperately to and fro, as though in a vain attempt to see through not only darkness, but walls, as well.

Jamie raised his brows at me, but he could see as well as I that she wasn’t raving, incoherent as she sounded. She realized what she sounded like; I could see the effort in her face as she pulled herself together.

“He’s come for the gold,” she said, lowering her voice. “The Frenchman’s gold.”

“Oh, aye?” Jamie said cautiously. He darted a glance at me, one eyebrow raised, but I shook my head. She wasn’t having hallucinations.

Jocasta sighed with impatience and shook her head, then stopped abruptly, with a muffled “Och!” of pain, putting both hands to her head as though to keep it on her shoulders.

She breathed deeply for a moment or two, her lips pressed tight together. Then she slowly lowered her hands.

“It started last night,” she said. “The pain in my eye.”

She’d waked in the night to a throbbing in her eye, a dull pain that spread slowly to the side of her head.

“It’s come before, ken,” she explained. She had pushed herself up to a sitting position now, and was beginning to look a little better, though she still held the warm cloth to her eye. “It began when I started to lose my sight. Sometimes it would be one eye, sometimes both. But I kent what was coming.”

But Jocasta MacKenzie Cameron Innes was not a woman to allow mere bodily indisposition to interfere with her plans, let alone interrupt what promised to be the most scintillating social affair in Cross Creek’s history.

“I was that disgusted,” she said. “And here Miss Flora MacDonald coming!”

But the arrangements had all been made; the barbecued carcasses were roasting in their pits, hogsheads of ale and beer stood ready by the stables, and the air was full of the fragrance of hot bread and beans from the cookhouse. The slaves were well-trained, and she had full faith that Ulysses would manage everything. All she must do, she’d thought, was to stay on her feet.

“I didna want to take opium or laudanum,” she explained. “Or I’d fall asleep for sure. So I made do wi’ the whisky.”

She was a tall woman, and thoroughly accustomed to an intake of liquor that would have felled a modern man. By the time the MacDonalds arrived, she’d had the better part of a bottle—but the pain was getting worse.

“And then my eye began to water so fierce, everyone would ha’ seen something was wrong, and I didna want that. So I came into my sitting room; I’d taken care to put a wee bottle of laudanum in my workbasket, in case the whisky should be not enough.

“Folk were swarming thick as lice outside, trying to catch a glimpse or a word with Miss MacDonald, but the sitting room was deserted, so far as I could tell, what wi’ my head pounding and my eye fit to explode.” She said this last quite casually, but I saw Jamie flinch, the memory of what I’d done with the needle obviously still fresh. He swallowed and wiped his knuckles hard across his mouth.

Jocasta had quickly abstracted the bottle of laudanum, swallowed a few gulps, and then sat for a moment, waiting for it to take effect.

“I dinna ken if ye’ve ever had the stuff, Nephew, but it gives ye an odd feeling, as though ye might be starting to dissolve at the edges. Take a drop too much, and ye begin to see things that aren’t there—blind or not—and hear them, too.”

Between the effects of laudanum and liquor and the noise of the crowd outside, she hadn’t noticed footsteps, and when the voice spoke near her, she’d thought for a moment that it was a hallucination.

“‘So here ye are, lass,’ he said,” she quoted, and her face, already pale, blanched further at the memory. “‘Remember me, do ye?’”

“I take it ye did, Aunt?” Jamie asked dryly.

“I did,” she replied just as dryly. “I’d heard that voice twice before. Once at the Gathering where your daughter was wed—and once more than twenty years ago, in an inn near Coigach, in Scotland.”

She lowered the wet cloth from her face and put it unerringly back into the bowl of warm water. Her eyes were red and swollen, raw against the pale skin, and looking terribly vulnerable in their blindness—but she had command of herself once more.

“Aye, I did ken him,” she repeated.

She had recognized the voice at once as one known—but for a moment, could not place it. Then realization had struck her, and she had clutched the arm of her chair for support.

“Who are ye?” she’d demanded, with what force she could summon. Her heart was pounding in time to the throbbing in her head and eye, and her senses swimming in whisky and laudanum. Perhaps it was the laudanum that seemed to transform the sound of the crowd outside into the sound of a nearby sea, the noise of a slave’s footsteps in the hall to the thump of the landlord’s clogs on the stairs of the inn.

“I was there. Truly there.” Despite the sweat that still ran down her face, I saw gooseflesh pebble the pale skin of her shoulders. “In the inn at Coigach. I smelt the sea, and I heard the men—Hector and Dougal—I could hear them! Arguing together, somewhere behind me. And the man wi’ the mask—I could see him,” she said, and a ripple went up the back of my own neck as she turned her blind eyes toward me. She spoke with such conviction that for an instant, it seemed she did see.

“Standing at the foot of the stair, just as he’d been twenty-five years ago, a knife in his hand and his eyes upon me through the holes in his mask.”

And, “Ye ken well enough who I am, lass,” he’d said, and she had seemed to see his smile, though dimly she had known she only heard it in his voice; she’d never seen his face, even when she had her sight.

She was sitting up, half doubled over, arms crossed over her breast as though in self-defense and her white hair wild and tangled down her back.

“He’s come back,” she said, and shook with a sudden convulsive shudder. “He’s come for the gold—and when he finds it, he will kill me.”

Jamie laid a hand on her arm, in an attempt to calm her.

“No one will kill ye while I’m here, Aunt,” he said. “So this man came to ye in your sitting room, and ye kent him from his voice. What else did he say to ye?”

She was still shivering, but not so badly. I thought it was as much reaction to massive amounts of laudanum and whisky as from fear.

She shook her head in the effort of recollection.

“He said—he said he had come to take the gold to its rightful owner. That we’d held it in trust, and while he didna grudge me what we’d spent of it, Hector and me—it wasna mine, had never been mine. I should tell him where it was, and he would see to the rest. And then he put his hand on me.” She ceased clutching herself, and held out one arm toward Jamie. “On my wrist. D’ye see the marks there? D’ye see them, Nephew?” She sounded anxious, and it occurred to me suddenly that she might doubt the existence of the visitor herself.

“Aye, Auntie,” Jamie said softly, touching her wrist. “There are marks.”

There were; three purplish smudges, small ovals where fingers had gripped.

“He squeezed, and then twisted my wrist so hard I thought it had snapped. Then he let go, but he didna step back. He stayed over me, and I could feel the heat of his breath and the stink of tobacco on my face.”