An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana. Страница 144

Bemused, he reached for the smaller bundle and untied the string. Unwrapped, the contents proved to be the claw of a large bear, pierced and strung on a leather thong. It was old; the edges were worn, and the knot in the leather had hardened so far that it would plainly never be untied again.

He stroked the claw with a thumb, tested the point. Well, the bear spirit had stood him in good stead so far. Smiling to himself, he put the thong over his head, leaving the claw to hang outside his shirt. Rachel Hunter stared at it, her face unreadable.

“You read my letter, Miss Hunter,” William said reprovingly. “Very naughty of you!”

The flush rose higher in her cheeks, but she met his eye with a directness he was unaccustomed to find in a woman—with the marked exception of his paternal grandmother.

“Thy speech is far superior to thy clothes, Friend William—even were they new. And while thee has been in thy right mind for some days now, thee has not chosen to say what brought thee to the Great Dismal. It is not a place frequented by gentlemen.”

“Oh, indeed it is, Miss Hunter. Many gentlemen of my acquaintance go there for the hunting, which is unexcelled. But naturally, one does not hunt wild boar or catamounts in one’s best linen.”

“Neither does one go hunting armed only with a frying pan, Friend William,” she riposted. “And if thee is a gentleman in truth—where is thy home, pray?”

He fumbled for an instant, unable to recall at once his alter ego’s particulars, and seized instead on the first city to come to his mind.

“Ah—Savannah. In the Carolinas,” he added helpfully.

“I know where it is,” she snapped. “And have heard men speak who come from there. Thee doesn’t.”

“Are you calling me a liar?” he said, amazed.

“I am.”

“Oh.” They sat gazing at each other in the half light of the gathering storm, each calculating. For an instant, he had the illusion that he was playing chess with his grandmother Benedicta.

“I am sorry for reading thy letter,” she said abruptly. “It was not vulgar curiosity, I assure thee.”

“What, then?” He smiled a little, to indicate that he bore no animus for her trespass. She didn’t smile back, but looked at him narrowly—not in suspicion, but as though gauging him in some way. At last she sighed, though, and her shoulders slumped.

“I wished to know a little of thee, and of thy character. The companions who brought thee to us seem dangerous men. And thy cousin? If thee is one like them, then—” Her teeth fixed briefly in her upper lip, but she shook her head, as though to herself, and continued more firmly.

“We must leave here within a few days—my brother and myself. Thee told Denny that thee travels north; I wish that we may travel with thee, at least for a time.”

Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. He blinked and said the first thing that came to his mind.

“Leave here? Why? The… er… the neighbors?”

She looked surprised at that.

“What?”

“I beg your pardon, ma’am. Your brother seemed to indicate that relations between your family and those who dwell nearby were… somewhat strained?”

“Oh.” One corner of her mouth tucked back; he could not tell if this betokened distress or amusement—but rather thought it was the latter.

“I see,” she said, and drummed her fingers thoughtfully on the table. “Yes, that’s true, though it was not what I—well, and yet it has to do with the matter. I see I must tell thee everything, then. What does thee know about the Society of Friends?”

He knew only one family of Quakers, the Unwins. Mr. Unwin was a wealthy merchant who knew his father, and he had met the two daughters at a musicale once, but the conversation had not touched upon philosophy or religion.

“They—er, you—dislike conflict, I believe?” he answered cautiously.

That surprisingly made her laugh, and he felt pleasure at having removed the tiny furrow between her brows, if only temporarily.

“Violence,” she corrected. “We thrive upon conflict, if it be verbal. And given the form of our worship—Denny says thee is not a Papist after all, yet I venture to suppose that thee have never attended a Quaker meeting?”

“The opportunity has not so far occurred, no.”

“I thought not. Well, then.” She eyed him consideringly. “We have preachers who will come to speak at meeting—but anyone may speak at meeting, upon any subject, if the spirit moves him or her to do so.”

“Her? Women speak in public, too?”

She gave him a withering look.

“I have a tongue, just as thee does.”

“I’d noticed,” he said, and smiled at her. “Continue, please.”

She leaned forward a little to do so but was interrupted by the crash of a shutter swinging back against the house, this followed by a spatter of rain, dashed hard across the window. Rachel sprang to her feet with a brief exclamation.

“I must get the chickens in! Close the shutters,” she ordered him, and dashed out.

Taken aback but amused, he did so, moving slowly. Going upstairs to fasten the upper shutters made him dizzy again, and he paused on the threshold of the bedroom, holding the doorjamb until his balance returned. There were two rooms upstairs: the bedroom at the front of the house, where they had put him, and a smaller room in the rear. The Hunters now shared this room; there was a truckle bed, a washstand with a silver candlestick upon it, and little else, save a row of pegs upon which hung the doctor’s spare shirt and breeches, a woolen shawl, and what must be Rachel Hunter’s go-to-meeting gown, a sober-looking garment dyed with indigo.

With rain and wind muffled by the shutters, the dim room seemed still now, and peaceful, a harbor from the storm. His heart had slowed from the exertion of climbing the stair, and he stood for a moment, enjoying the slightly illicit sense of trespass. No sound from below; Rachel must be still in pursuit of the chickens.

There was something faintly odd about the room, and it took him only a moment to decide what it was. The shabbiness and sparsity of the Hunters’ personal possessions argued poverty—yet these contrasted with the small signs of prosperity evident in the furnishings: the candlestick was silver, not plate or pewter, and the ewer and basin were not earthenware but good china, painted with sprawling blue chrysanthemums.

He lifted the skirt of the blue dress hanging on the peg, examining it curiously. Modesty was one thing; threadbareness was another. The hem was worn nearly white, the indigo faded so that the folds of the skirt showed a fanshaped pattern of light and dark. The Misses Unwin had dressed quietly, but their clothes were of the highest quality.

On sudden impulse, he brought the cloth to his face, breathing in. It smelled faintly still of indigo, and of grass and live things—and very perceptibly of a woman’s body. The musk of it ran through him like the pleasure of good wine.

The sound of the door closing below made him drop the dress as though it had burst into flame, and he made for the stairs, heart hammering.

Rachel Hunter was shaking herself on the hearth, shedding drops of water from her apron, her cap wilted and soggy on her head. Not seeing him, she took this off, wrung it out with a mutter of impatience, and hung it on a nail hammered into the chimney breast.

Her hair fell down her back, wet-tailed and shining, dark against the pale cloth of her jacket.

“The chickens are all safe, I trust?” He spoke, because to watch her unawares with her hair down, the smell of her still vivid in his nose, seemed suddenly to be an unwarrantable intimacy.

She turned round, eyes wary, but made no immediate move to cover her hair.

“All but the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual.”

“Perverse?” Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.