Drums of Autumn (33 page)

Suddenly a hand shot through the leaves and grabbed my wrist.

“It’s up to me to keep ye safe!”

I tried to jerk away, but he had a tight grip on me, and he wasn’t letting go.

“I am not a young girl who needs protection, nor yet an idiot! If there’s some reason for me not to do something, then tell me and I’ll listen. But you can’t decide what I’m to do and where I’m to go without even consulting me—I won’t stand for that, and you bloody well know it!”

The boat lurched, and with a huge rustling of leaves, he popped his head through the willow, glaring.

“I am not trying to say where ye’ll go!”

“You decided where I
mustn’t
go, and that’s just as bad!” The willow leaves slid back over his shoulders as the boat moved, jarred by his violence, and we revolved slowly, coming out of the tree’s shadow.

He loomed in front of me, massive as the mill, his head and shoulders blotting out a good bit of the scenery behind him. The long, straight nose was an inch from mine, and his eyes had gone narrow. They were a dark enough blue to be black in this light, and looking into them at close range was most unnerving.

I blinked. He didn’t.

He had let go of my wrist when he came through the leaves. Now he took hold of my upper arms. I could feel the heat of his grip through the cloth. His hands were very big and very hard, making me suddenly aware of the fragility of my own bones in contrast.
I am a violent man
.

He’d shaken me a time or two before, and I hadn’t liked it. In case he had something of the sort in mind just now, I inserted a foot between his legs, and prepared to give him a swift knee where it would do most good.

“I was wrong,” he said.

Tensed for violence, I had actually started to jerk my foot up, when I heard what he had said. Before I could stop, he had clamped his legs tight together, trapping my knee between his thighs.

“I
said
I was wrong, Sassenach,” he repeated, a touch of impatience in his voice. “D’ye mind?”

“Ah…no,” I said, feeling a trifle sheepish. I wiggled my knee tentatively, but he kept his thighs squeezed tight together.

“You wouldn’t consider letting go of me, would you?” I said politely. My heart was still pounding.

“No, I wouldn’t. Are ye going to listen to me now?”

“I suppose so,” I said, still polite. “It doesn’t look as though I’m very busy at the moment.”

I was close enough to see his mouth twitch. His thighs squeezed tighter for a moment, then relaxed.

“This is a verra foolish quarrel, and you know that as well as I do.”

“No, I don’t.” My anger had faded somewhat, but I wasn’t about to let him dismiss it altogether. “It’s maybe not important to you, but it is to me. It isn’t foolish. And you know it, or you wouldn’t be admitting you’re wrong.”

The twitch was more pronounced this time. He took a deep breath, and dropped his hands from my shoulders.

“Well, then. I should maybe have told ye about Byrnes; I admit it. But if I had, ye would have gone to him, even if I’d said it was the lockjaw—and I kent it was, I’ve seen it before. Even if there was nothing ye could do, you’d still go? No?”

“Yes. Even if—yes, I would have gone.”

In fact, there was nothing I could have done for Byrnes. Myers’s anesthetic wouldn’t have helped a case of tetanus. Nothing short of injectable curare would ease those spasms. I could have given him nothing more than the comfort of my presence, and it was doubtful that he would have appreciated that—or even noticed it. Still, I would have felt bound to offer it.

“I would have had to go,” I said, more gently. “I’m a doctor. Don’t you see?”

“Of course I do,” he said gruffly. “D’ye think I dinna ken ye at all, Sassenach?”

Without waiting for an answer, he went on.

“There was talk about what happened at the mill—there would be, aye? But with the man dying under your hands as he did—well, no one’s said straight out that ye might have killed him on purpose…but it’s easy to see folk thinkin’ it. Not thinkin’ that ye killed him, even—but only that ye might have thought to let him die on purpose, so as to save him from the rope.”

I stared at my hands, spread out on my knees, nearly as pale as the ivory satin under them.

“I did think of it.”

“I ken that fine, aye?” he said dryly. “I saw your face, Sassenach.”

I drew a deep breath, if only to assure myself that the air was no longer thick with the smell of blood. There was nothing but the turpentine scent of the pine forest, clean and astringent in my nostrils. I had a sudden vivid memory of the hospital, of the smell of pine-scented disinfectant that hung in the air, that overlaid but could not banish the underlying smell of sickness.

I took another cleansing breath, and raised my head to look at Jamie.

“And did
you
wonder if I’d killed him?”

He looked faintly surprised.

“Ye would have done as ye thought best.” He dismissed the minor question of whether I’d killed a man, in favor of the point at issue.

“But it didna seem wise for ye to preside over both deaths, if ye take my meaning.”

I did, and not for the first time I was aware of the subtle networks of which he was a part, in a way I could never be. This place in its way was as strange to him as it was to me; and yet he knew not only what people were saying—anyone could find that out, who cared to haunt tavern and market—but what they were thinking.

What was more irritating was that he knew what
I
was thinking.

“So ye see,” he said, watching me. “I kent Byrnes was sure to die, and ye couldna help. Yet if ye knew his trouble, ye’d surely go to him. And then he would die, and folk would maybe not say how strange it was, that both men had died under your hand, so to speak—but—”

“But they’d be thinking it,” I finished for him.

The twitch grew into a crooked smile.

“Folk notice you, Sassenach.”

I bit my lip. For good or for ill, they did, and the noticing had come close to killing me more than once.

He rose, and taking hold of a branch for balance, stepped out on the gravel and pulled the plaid up over his shoulder.

“I told Mrs. Byrnes I would fetch away her husband’s things from the mill,” he said. “Ye needna come, if ye dinna wish.”

The mill loomed against the star-spattered sky. It couldn’t have looked more sinister if it had tried.
Whither thou goest, I will go
.

I thought I knew now what he was doing. He had wanted to see it all, before making up his mind; see it with the knowledge that it might be his. Walking through the gardens and orchards, rowing past the acres of thick pines, visiting the mill—he was surveying the domain he was offered, weighing and evaluating, deciding what complications must be dealt with, and whether he could or would accept the challenge.

After all, I thought sourly, the Devil had insisted on showing Jesus everything He was passing up, taking Him up to the top of the Temple to gaze on the cities of the world. The only difficulty was that if Jamie decided to fling himself off, there wasn’t a legion of angels standing by to stop him dashing his foot—and everything else—against a slab of Scottish granite.

Only me.

“Wait,” I said, clambering out of the boat. “I’m coming, too.”

The lumber was still stacked in the millyard; no one had moved any of it since the last time I had been here. The dark took away all sense of perspective; the stacks of fresh timber were pale rectangles that seemed to float above an invisible ground, first distant, then suddenly looming close enough to brush my skirts. The air smelt of pinesap and sawdust.

I couldn’t see the ground under my own feet, for that matter, obscured as it was both by darkness and by my billowing ivory skirt. Jamie held my arm to keep me from stumbling. He never stumbled, of course. Perhaps living all his life without even the thought of light outside after sunset had given him some sort of radar, I thought; like a bat.

There was a fire burning, somewhere among the slave huts. It was very late; most would be sleeping. In the Indies, there would have been the nightlong sound of drums and keening; the slaves would have made lamentations for a fellow’s death, a festival of mourning to last the week. Here, there was nothing. No sound save the pine trees’ soughing, no flicker of movement save the faint light at the forest’s edge.

“They are afraid,” Jamie said softly, pausing to listen to the silence, as I did.

“Little wonder,” I said, half under my breath. “So am I.”

He made a small huffing sound that might have been amusement.

“So am I,” he muttered, “but not of ghosts.” He took my arm and pushed open the small man-door at the side of the mill before I could ask what he
was
afraid of.

The silence inside had a body to it. At first I thought it like the eerie quiet of dead battlefields, but then I realized the difference. This silence was alive. And whatever lived in the silence here, it wasn’t lying quiet. I thought I could still smell the blood, thick on the air.

Then I breathed deeply and thought again, cold horror rippling up my spine. I
could
smell blood. Fresh blood.

I gripped Jamie’s arm, but he had smelled it himself; his arm had gone hard under my hand, muscles tensed in wariness. Without a word, he detached himself from my grip, and vanished.

For a moment, I thought he truly
had
vanished, and nearly panicked, groping for him, my hand closing on the empty air where he’d stood. Then I realized that he had merely flung the dark plaid over his head, instantly hiding the paleness of face and linen shirt. I heard his step, quick and light on the dirt floor, and then that was gone too.

The air was hot and still, and thick with blood. A rank, sweet smell, with a metal taste on the back of the tongue. Exactly the same as it had been a week ago, conjuring hallucination. Still in the grip of a cold grue, I swung around and strained my eyes toward the far side of the cavernous room, half expecting to see the scene engraved on my memory materialize again out of darkness. The rope stretched tight from the lumber crane, the huge hook swaying with its groaning burden…

A groan rent the air, and I nearly bit my lip in two. My throat swelled with a swallowed scream; only the fear of drawing something to me kept me silent.

Where was Jamie? I longed to call out for him, but didn’t dare. My eyes had grown enough accustomed to the dark to make out the shadow of the saw blade, an amorphous blob ten feet away, but the far side of the room was a wall of blackness. I strained my eyes to see, realizing belatedly that in my pale dress, I was undoubtedly visible to anyone in the room with me.

The groan came again, and I started convulsively. My palms were sweating.
It’s not!
I told myself fiercely.
It isn’t, it can’t be!

I was paralyzed with fear, and it took some moments for me to realize what my ears had told me. The sound hadn’t come from the blackness across the room, where the crane stood with its hook. It had come from somewhere behind me.

I whirled. The door we had come through was still open, a pale rectangle in the pitch-black. Nothing showed, nothing moved between me and the door. I took a quick step toward it and stopped. Every muscle in my legs strained to run like hell—but I couldn’t leave Jamie.

Again the sound, that same sobbing gasp of physical anguish; pain past the point of crying out. With it, a new thought popped into my mind; what if it was Jamie making the sound?

Shocked out of caution, I turned toward the sound and shouted his name, raising echoes from the roof high above.

“Jamie!” I cried again. “Where
are
you?”

“Here, Sassenach.” Jamie’s muffled voice came from somewhere to my left, calm but somehow urgent. “Come to me, will ye?”

It wasn’t him. Nearly shaking with relief at the sound of his voice, I blundered through the dark, not caring now what had made the sound, as long as it wasn’t Jamie.

My hand struck a wooden wall, groped blindly, and finally found a door, standing open. He was inside the overseer’s quarters.

I stepped through the door, and felt the change at once. The air was even closer, and much hotter, than that in the mill proper. The floor here was of wood, but there was no echo to my step; the air was dead still, suffocating. And the smell of blood was even stronger.

“Where are you?” I called again, low-voiced this time.

“Here,” came the reply, startlingly near at hand. “By the bed. Come and help me; it’s a lass.”

He was in the tiny bedroom. The small room was windowless, and lightless too. I found them by feel, Jamie kneeling on the wooden floor beside a narrow bed, and in the bed, a body.

It was a female, as he’d said; touch told me that at once. Touch told me also that she was exsanguinating. The cheek I brushed was cool and clammy. Everything else I touched was warm and wet; her clothing, the bedclothes, the mattress beneath her. I could feel wetness soaking through my skirt where I knelt on the floor.

I felt for a pulse in the throat and couldn’t find it. The chest moved slightly under my hand, the only sign of life beyond the faint sigh that went with it.

“It’s all right now,” I heard myself saying, and my voice was soothing, all trace of panic gone, though in truth there was more reason for it now. “We’re here, you’re not alone. What’s happened to you, can you tell me?”

All the time my hands were darting over head and throat and chest and stomach, pushing sodden clothes aside, searching blindly, frantically, for a wound to stanch. Nothing, no spurt of artery, no raw gash. And all the time, there was a faint but steady
pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat,
like the sound of tiny feet running.

“Tell…” It was not so much a word as the articulation of a sigh. Then a catch, a sobbing breath indrawn.

“Who has done this to ye, lass?” Jamie’s disembodied voice came low and urgent. “Tell me, who?”

“Tell…”

I touched all the places where the great vessels lie close beneath the skin and found them whole. Seized her by an unresisting arm and lifted, thrust a hand beneath to feel her back. All the heat of her body was there; the bodice was damp with sweat, but not blood-soaked.