“Claire.” Jamie’s voice was soft, but I felt his breath on my face and my eyes popped open. His eyes were soft, too, shadowed with sorrow. Very slowly, he lifted a hand and touched my lips.

“Tom,” I blurted. “I feel as though he’s already dead, because of me, and it’s so terrible. I can’t bear it, Jamie, I really can’t!”

“I know.” He moved his hand, hesitated. “Can ye bear it if I touch ye?”

“I don’t know.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Try it and see.”

That made him smile, though I’d spoken with complete seriousness. He put his hand gently on my shoulder and turned me, then gathered me against him, moving slowly, so that I might pull back. I didn’t.

I sank into him, and clung to him as though he was a floating spar, the only thing keeping me from drowning. He was.

He held me close and stroked my hair for a long time.

“Can ye weep for them, mo nighean donn?” he whispered into my hair at last. “Let them come in.”

The mere idea made me go rigid with panic again. “I can’t.”

“Weep for them,” he whispered, and his voice opened me deeper than his cock. “Ye canna hold a ghost at bay.”

“I can’t. I’m afraid,” I said, but I was already shaking with grief, tears wet on my face. “I can’t!”

And yet I did. Gave up the struggle and opened myself, to memory and sorrow. Sobbed as though my heart would break—and let it break, for them, and all I could not save.

“Let them come, and grieve them, Claire,” he whispered. “And when they’ve gone, I’ll take ye home.”

99



OLD MASTER

River Run

IT HAD RAINED HARD THE NIGHT BEFORE, and while the sun had come out bright and hot, the ground was soggy and steam seemed to rise from it, adding to the thickness of the air. Brianna had put her hair up, to keep it off her neck, but wisps escaped constantly, clinging damply to forehead and cheeks, always in her eyes. She wiped a strand away crossly with the back of her hand; her fingers were smeared with the pigment she was grinding—and the humidity wasn’t doing that any good, making the powder clump and cling to the sides of the mortar.

She needed it, though; she had a new commission, due to start this afternoon.

Jem was hanging round, too, bored and poking his fingers into everything. He was singing to himself, half under his breath; she paid no attention, until she happened to catch a few words.

“What did you say?” she asked, rounding on him incredulously. He couldn’t have been singing “Folsom Prison Blues”—could he?

He blinked at her, lowered his chin to his chest, and said—in the deepest voice he could produce—“Hello. I’m Johnny Cash.”

She narrowly stopped herself laughing out loud, feeling her cheeks go pink with the effort of containment.

“Where did you get that?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well. There was only one place he could have gotten it, and her heart rose up at the thought.

“Daddy,” he said logically.

“Has Daddy been singing?” she asked, trying to sound casual. He had to have been. And, just as obviously, had to have been trying Claire’s advice, to shift the register of his voice so as to loosen his frozen vocal cords.

“Uh-huh. Daddy sings a lot. He teached me the song about Sunday morning, and the one about Tom Dooley, and … and lots,” he ended, rather at a loss.

“Did he? Well, that’s—put that down!” she said, as he idly picked up an open pouch of rose madder.

“Oops.” He looked guiltily at the blob of paint that had erupted from the leather pouch and landed on his shirt, then at her, and made a tentative move toward the door.

“Oops, he says,” she said darkly. “Don’t you move!” Snaking out a hand, she grabbed him by the collar and applied a turpentine-soaked rag vigorously to the front of his shirt, succeeding only in producing a large pink blotch rather than a vivid red line.

Jem was silent during this ordeal, head bobbing as she pulled him to and fro, swabbing.

“What are you doing in here, anyway?” she demanded crossly. “Didn’t I tell you to go find something to do?” There was no shortage of things to do at River Run, after all.

He hung his head and muttered something, in which she made out the word “scared.”

“Scared? Of what?” A little more gently, she pulled the shirt off over his head.

“The ghost.”

“What ghost?” she asked warily, not sure yet how to handle this. She was aware that all of the slaves at River Run believed implicitly in ghosts, simply as a fact of life. So did virtually all of the Scottish settlers in Cross Creek, Campbelton, and the Ridge. And the Germans from Salem and Bethania. So, for that matter, did her own father.

She could not simply inform Jem that there was no such thing as a ghost—particularly as she was not entirely convinced of that herself.

“Maighistear àrsaidh’s ghost,” he said, looking up at her for the first time, his dark blue eyes troubled. “Josh says he’s been walkin’.”

Something skittered down her back like a centipede. Maighistear àrsaidh was Old Master—Hector Cameron. Involuntarily, she glanced toward the window. They were in the small room above the stable block where she did the messier bits of paint preparation, and Hector Cameron’s white marble mausoleum was clearly visible from here, gleaming like a tooth at the side of the lawn below.

“What makes Josh say that, I wonder?” she said, stalling for time. Her first impulse was to observe that ghosts didn’t walk in broad daylight—but the obvious corollary to that was that they did walk by night, and the last thing she wanted to do was give Jem nightmares.

“He says Angelina saw him, night before last. A big ol’ ghost,” he said, stretching up, hands clawed, and widening his eyes in obvious imitation of Josh’s account.

“Yeah? What was he doing?” She kept her tone light, only mildly interested, and it seemed to be working; Jem was more interested than scared, for the moment.

“Walkin’,” Jem said with a small shrug. What else did ghosts do, after all?

“Was he smoking a pipe?” She’d caught sight of a tall gentleman strolling under the trees on the lawn below, and had an idea.

Jem looked somewhat taken aback at the notion of a pipe-smoking ghost.

“I dunno,” he said dubiously. “Do ghosts smoke pipes?”

“I sort of doubt it,” she said. “But Mr. Buchanan does. See him down there on the lawn?” She moved aside, gesturing toward the window with her chin, and Jem rose up on his toes to look out over the sill. Mr. Buchanan, an acquaintance of Duncan’s who was staying at the house, was in fact smoking a pipe at this very moment; the faint aroma of his tobacco reached them through the open window.

“I think probably Angelina saw Mr. Buchanan walking around in the dark,” she said. “Maybe he was in his nightshirt, going out to the necessary, and she just saw the white and thought he was a ghost.”

Jem giggled at the thought. He seemed willing to be reassured, but hunched his skinny shoulders, peering closely at Mr. Buchanan.

“Josh says Angelina says the ghost was comin’ out of old Mr. Hector’s tomb,” he said.

“I expect Mr. Buchanan just walked round it, and she saw him coming along the side, and thought he was coming out of it,” she said, carefully avoiding any question as to why a middle-aged Scottish gentleman should be walking round tombs in his nightshirt; obviously, that wasn’t a notion that struck Jemmy as odd.

It did occur to her to ask just what Angelina was doing outside in the middle of the night seeing ghosts, but on second thought, better not. The most likely reason for a maid’s stealing out at night wasn’t something a boy of Jemmy’s age needed to hear about, either.

Her lips tightened a little at the thought of Malva Christie, who had perhaps gone to a rendezvous of her own in Claire’s garden. Who? she wondered for the thousandth time, even as she automatically crossed herself, with a brief prayer for the repose of Malva’s soul. Who had it been? If ever there were a ghost that should walk …