ONE WHO IS

I WAS WAITING AT THE RAIL again before dawn the next day. The smell of ashes was strong and acrid on the wind, but the smoke had gone. An early-morning haze still shrouded the shore, though, and I felt a small thrill of déjà vu, mingled with hope, as I saw the small boat come out of the mist, pulling slowly toward the ship.

As it grew closer, though, my hands tightened on the rail. It wasn’t Jamie. For a few moments, I tried to convince myself that it was, that he had merely changed his coat—but with each stroke of the oars, it became more certain. I closed my eyes, stinging with tears, all the while telling myself that it was absurd to be so upset; it meant nothing.

Jamie would be here; he’d said so. The fact that someone else was coming early to the ship had nothing to do with him or me.

It did, though. Opening my eyes and wiping them on my wrist, I looked again at the rowboat, and felt a start of disbelief. It couldn’t be. It was, though. He looked up at the watch’s hail, and saw me at the rail. Our eyes met for an instant, then he bowed his head, reaching to the oars. Tom Christie.

The Governor was not amused at being roused from his bed at dawn for the third day running; I could hear him below, ordering one of the Marines to tell the fellow, whoever he was, to wait to a more reasonable hour—this followed by a peremptory slam of the cabin door.

I was not amused, either, and in no mood to wait. The Marine at the head of the companionway refused to allow me below, though. Heart pounding, then, I turned and made my way to the stern, where they had put Christie to wait the Governor’s pleasure.

The Marine there hesitated, but after all, there were no orders to prevent me speaking with visitors; he let me pass.

“Mr. Christie.” He was standing at the rail, staring back at the coast, but turned at my words.

“Mrs. Fraser.” He was very pale; his grizzled beard stood out nearly black. He had trimmed it, though, and his hair, as well. While he still looked like a lightning-blasted tree, there was life in his eyes once more when he looked at me.

“My husband—” I began, but he cut me off.

“He is well. He awaits you on the shore; you will see him presently.”

“Oh?” The boil of fear and fury inside me reduced itself slightly, as though someone had turned down the flame, but a sense of impatience was still steaming. “Well, what in bloody hell is going on, will you tell me that?”

He looked at me for a long moment in silence, then licked his lips briefly, and turned to look over the rail at the smooth gray swell. He glanced back at me and drew a deep breath, obviously bracing himself for something.

“I have come to confess to the murder of my daughter.”

I simply stared at him, unable to make sense of his words. Then I assembled them into a sentence, read it from the tablet of my mind, and finally grasped it.

“No, you haven’t,” I said.

The faintest shadow of a smile seemed to stir in his beard, though it vanished almost before I had seen it.

“You remain contrary, I see,” he said dryly.

“Never mind what I remain,” I said, rather rudely. “Are you insane? Or is this Jamie’s latest plan? Because if so—”

He stopped me with a hand on my wrist; I started at the touch, not expecting it.

“It is the truth,” he said very softly. “And I will swear to it by the Holy Scriptures.”

I stood looking at him, not moving. He looked back, directly, and I realized suddenly how seldom he had ever met my eyes; all through our acquaintance, he had glanced away, avoided my gaze, as though he sought to escape any real acknowledgment of me, even when obliged to speak to me.

Now that was gone, and the look in his eyes was nothing I had ever seen before. The lines of pain and suffering cut deep around them, and the lids were heavy with sorrow—but the eyes themselves were deep and calm as the sea beneath us. That sense he had carried through our nightmare journey south, that atmosphere of mute horror, numb pain, had left him, replaced by resolve and something else—something that burned, far down in his depths.

“Why?” I said at last, and he let go his grip on my wrist, stepping back a pace.

“D’ye remember once”—from the reminiscent tone of his voice, it might have been decades before—“ye asked me, did I think ye a witch?”

“I remember,” I replied guardedly. “You said—” Now I remembered that conversation, all right, and something small and icy fluttered at the base of my spine. “You said that you believed in witches, all right—but you didn’t think I was one.”

He nodded, dark gray eyes fixed on me. I wondered whether he was about to revise that opinion, but apparently not.

“I believe in witches,” he said with complete matter-of-fact seriousness. “For I’ve kent them. The girl was one, as was her mother before her.” The icy flutter grew stronger.

“The girl,” I said. “You mean your daughter? Malva?”

He shook his head a little, and his eyes took on a darker hue. “No daughter of mine,” he said.

“Not—not yours? But—her eyes. She had your eyes.” I heard myself say it, and could have bitten my tongue. He only smiled, though, grimly.

“And my brother’s.” He turned to the rail, put his hands on it, and looked across the stretch of sea, toward land. “Edgar was his name. When the Rising came, and I declared for the Stuarts, he would have none of it, saying ’twas folly. He begged me not to go.” He shook his head slowly, seeing something in memory, that I knew was not the wooded shore.

“I thought—well, it doesna matter what I thought, but I went. And asked him, would he mind my wife, and the wee lad.” He drew a deep breath, let it slowly out. “And he did.”

“I see,” I said very quietly. He turned his head sharply at the tone of my voice, gray eyes piercing.

“It was not his fault! Mona was a witch—an enchantress.” His lips compressed at the expression on my face. “Ye don’t believe me, I see. It is the truth; more than once, I caught her at it—working her charms, observing times—I came once to the roof o’ the house at midnight, searching for her. I saw her there, stark naked and staring at the stars, standing in the center of a pentacle she’d drawn wi’ the blood of a strangled dove, and her hair flying loose, mad in the wind.”

“Her hair,” I said, looking for some thread to grasp in this, and suddenly realizing. “She had hair like mine, didn’t she?”

He nodded, looking away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.

“She was … what she was,” he said softly. “I tried to save her—by prayer, by love. I could not.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, keeping my voice as low as his. With the wind as it was, there was little chance of our being overheard here, but this was not the sort of thing I thought anyone should hear.

He sighed, and swallowed again.

“She was hangit,” he said, sounding almost matter-of-fact about it. “For the murder of my brother.”

This, it seemed, had happened while Tom was imprisoned at Ardsmuir; she had sent him word, before her execution, telling him of Malva’s birth, and that she was confiding care of the children to Edgar’s wife.

“I suppose she thought that funny,” he said, sounding abstracted. “She’d the oddest sense of humor, Mona had.”

I felt cold, beyond the chill of the early-morning breeze, and hugged my elbows.

“But you got them back—Allan and Malva.”

He nodded; he had been transported, but had the good fortune to have his indenture bought by a kind and wealthy man, who had given him the money for the children’s passage to the Colonies. But then both his employer and the wife he had taken here had died in an epidemic of the yellow fever, and casting about for some new opportunity, he had heard of Jamie Fraser’s settling in North Carolina and that he would help those men he had known in Ardsmuir to land of their own.