The well lid was ajar; he bent to draw it into place and found the boards had warped. He added fixing that to the constant list of chores and repairs that he carried in his head, wishing fervently that he could devote the next few days to digging, hauling manure, shingling, and the like, instead of what he was about to do.

He’d rather bury the old privy pit or castrate pigs than go and ask Roger Mac what he kent about Indians and revolutions. He found it mildly gruesome to discuss the future with his son-in-law, and tried never to do it.

The things Claire told him of her own time seemed often fantastic, with the enjoyable half-real sense of faery tales, and sometimes macabre, but always interesting, for what he learned of his wife from the telling. Brianna tended to share with him small, homely details of machinery, which were interesting, or wild stories of men walking on the moon, which were immensely entertaining, but no threat to his peace of mind.

Roger Mac, though, had a cold-blooded way of talking that reminded him to an uncomfortable degree of the works of the historians he’d read, and had therefore a sense of concrete doom about it. Talking to Roger Mac made it seem all too likely that this, that, or the other frightful happenstance was not only indeed going to happen—but would most likely have direct and personal consequences.

It was like talking to a particularly evil-minded fortune-teller, he thought, one you hadn’t paid enough to hear something pleasant. The thought made a sudden memory pop up on the surface of his mind, bobbing like a fishing cork.

In Paris. He’d been with friends, other students, drinking in the piss-smelling taverns near the université. He’d been fairly drunk himself when someone took a fancy to have his palms read, and he had pushed with the others into the corner where the old woman who did it always sat, scarcely visible amid the gloom and clouds of pipe smoke.

He hadn’t intended to do it himself; he had only a few pennies in his pocket, and didn’t mean to waste them on unholy nonsense. He’d said so, loudly.

Whereupon a scraggy claw had shot out of the darkness and seized his hand, sinking long, filthy nails into his flesh. He’d yelped in surprise, and his friends all laughed. They laughed harder when she spat in his palm.

She rubbed the spittle into his skin in a businesslike way, bent close enough that he could smell the ancient sweat of her and see the lice crawling in the grizzled hair that keeked from the edge of her rusty-black shawl. She peered into his hand and a dirty nail traced the lines of it, tickling. He tried to pull his hand away, but she tightened her grip on his wrist, and he found to his surprise that he could not break it.

“T’es un chat, toi,” the old woman had remarked, in tones of malicious interest. “You’re a cat, you. A little red cat.”

Dubois—that was his name, Dubois—had at once begun to miaou and yowl, to the amusement of the others. He himself refused to rise to the bait, and saying only, “Merci, madame,” tried again to pull away.

“Neuf,” she said, tapping rapid random places on his palm, then seizing a finger and wiggling it by way of emphasis. “You have a nine in your hand. And death,” she’d added offhandedly. “You’ll die nine times before you rest in your grave.”

She’d let go then, amidst a chorus of sarcastic “aou-la-las!” from the French students, and laughter from the rest.

He snorted, sending the memory back where it came from, and good riddance to it. The old woman refused to go so easily, though, and called to him through the years, as she’d called through the raucous, beer-filled air of the tavern.

“Sometimes dying doesn’t hurt, mon p’tit chat,” she’d called after him, mocking. “But more often it does.”

“No it doesn’t,” he muttered, and stopped, appalled, hearing himself. Christ. It wasn’t himself he was hearing, but his godfather.

“Don’t be afraid, laddie. It doesna hurt a bit, to die.” He missed his footing and staggered, caught himself and stood still, a taste of metal on the back of his tongue.

His heart was thumping, suddenly, for no reason, as though he had run miles. He saw the cabin, certainly, and heard the calling of jays in the half-leafed chestnut trees. But he saw even more clearly Murtagh’s face, the grim lines of it relaxing into peace and the deep-set black eyes fixed on his, shifting in and out of focus, as though his godfather looked at once at him and at something far beyond him. He felt the weight of Murtagh’s body in his arms, growing suddenly heavy as he died.

The vision vanished, as abruptly as it had come, and he found himself standing next to a rain puddle, staring at a wooden duck half-mired in the mud.

He crossed himself, with a quick word for the repose of Murtagh’s soul, then bent and retrieved the duck, washing the mud away in the puddle. His hands were trembling, and little wonder. His memories of Culloden were few and fragmentary—but they were beginning to come back.

So far, such things had come to him only in glimpses at the edge of sleep. He’d seen Murtagh there before, and in the dreams that followed.

He hadn’t told Claire about them. Not yet.

He pushed open the door of the cabin, but it was empty, the hearth smoored, spinning wheel and loom standing idle. Brianna was likely at Fergus’s place, visiting Marsali. Where would Roger Mac be now? He stepped back outside and stood listening.

The thump of an ax came faintly from somewhere in the forest beyond the cabin. It stopped, then, and he heard men’s voices, raised in greeting. He turned and headed for the trail that led upslope, half grown over with spring grass, but showing the black smudges of fresh footmarks.

What might the old woman have told him if he’d paid her? he wondered. Had she lied to spite him for his miserliness—or told him the truth, for the same reason?

One of the more disagreeable things about talking to Roger Mac was that Jamie was sure he always told the truth.

He’d forgotten to leave the duck at the cabin. Wiping it on his breeches, he pushed grimly through the sprouting weeds, to hear what fate awaited him.

11



BLOODWORK

I PUSHED THE MICROSCOPE toward Bobby Higgins, who had returned from his errand, his own discomforts forgotten in worry for Lizzie.

“See the round pinkish things?” I said. “Those are Lizzie’s blood cells. Everyone has blood cells,” I added. “They’re what make your blood red.”

“‘Strewth,” he muttered, amazed. “I never knew!”

“Well, now you do,” I said. “Do you see that some of the blood cells are broken? And that some have little spots in them?”

“I do, mum,” he said, screwing up his face and peering intently. “What are ’ey, then?”

“Parasites. Little beasts that get into your blood if a certain kind of mosquito bites you,” I explained. “They’re called Plasmodium. Once you’ve got them, they go on living in your blood—but every so often, they begin to … er … breed. When there are too many of them, they burst out of the blood cells, and that’s what causes a malarial attack—the ague. The sludge of the broken blood cells sort of silts up, you see, in the organs, and makes you feel terribly sick.”

“Oh.” He straightened up, making a face of deep aversion at the microscope. “That’s … that’s pure gashly, that is!”

“Yes, it is,” I said, succeeding in keeping a straight face. “But quinine—Jesuit bark, you know?—will help stop it.”

“Oh, that’s good, mum, very good,” he said, his face lightening. “However you do come to know such things,” he said, shaking his head. “’Tis a wonder!”

“Oh, I know quite a lot of things about parasites,” I said casually, taking the saucer off the bowl in which I had been brewing the mix of dogwood bark and gallberries. The liquid was a rich purplish black, and looked slightly viscous, now that it had cooled. It also smelled lethal, from which I deduced that it was about ready.