Dragonfly in Amber

  She turned back to him, face haggard with fatigue, but eyes glowing with the rain-light, spangles of water caught in the tangles of her hair. Her hand rested on Roger’s arm, compelling as the wind that fills a boat’s sail and drives it on.

  “Let’s go back to the manse, Roger,” she said. “I have something particular to tell you.”

  * * *

  Claire was quiet on the walk back to the manse, avoiding Roger’s tentative queries. She refused his proffered arm, walking alone, head down in thought. Not as though she were making up her mind, Roger thought; she had already done that. She was deciding what to say.

  Roger himself was wondering. The quiet gave him respite from the turmoil of the day’s revelations—enough to wonder precisely why Claire had chosen to include him in them. She could easily have told Brianna alone, had she wished to. Was it only that she had feared what Brianna’s reaction to the story might be, and been reluctant to meet it alone? Or had she gambled that he would—as he had—believe her, and thus sought to enlist him as an ally in the cause of truth—her truth, and Brianna’s?

  His curiosity had reached near boiling point by the time they reached the manse. Still, there was work to do first; together, they unloaded one of the tallest bookshelves, and pushed it in front of the shattered window, shutting out the cold night air.

  Flushed from the exertion, Claire sat down on the sofa while he went to pour a pair of whiskies from the small drinks-table in the corner. When Mrs. Graham had been alive, she had always brought drinks on a tray, properly napkined, doilied, and adorned with accompanying biscuits. Fiona, if allowed, would willingly have done the same, but Roger much preferred the simplicity of pouring his own drink in solitude.

  Claire thanked him, sipped from the glass, then set it down and looked up at him, tired but composed.

  “You’ll likely be wondering why I wanted you to hear the whole story,” she said, with that unnerving ability to see into his thoughts.

  “There were two reasons. I’ll tell you the second presently, but as for the first, I thought you had some right to hear it.”

  “Me? What right?”

  The golden eyes were direct, unsettling as a leopard’s guileless stare. “The same as Brianna. The right to know who you are.” She moved across the room to the far wall. It was cork-lined from floor to ceiling, encrusted with layers of photographs, charts, notes, stray visiting cards, old parish schedules, spare keys, and other bits of rubbish pinned to the cork.

  “I remember this wall.” Claire smiled, touching a picture of Prize Day at the local grammar school. “Did your father ever take anything off it?”

  Roger shook his head, bewildered. “No, I don’t believe he did. He always said he could never find things put away in drawers; if it was anything important, he wanted it in plain sight.”

  “Then it’s likely still here. He thought it was important.”

  Reaching up, she began to thumb lightly through the overlapping layers, gently separating the yellowed papers.

  “This one, I think,” she murmured, after some riffling back and forth. Reaching far up under the detritus of sermon notes and car-wash tickets, she detached a single sheet of paper and laid it on the desk.

  “Why, it’s my family tree,” Roger said in surprise. “I haven’t seen that old thing in years. And never paid any attention to it when I did see it, either,” he added. “If you’re going to tell me I’m adopted, I already know that.”

  Claire nodded, intent on the chart. “Oh, yes. That’s why your father—Mr. Wakefield, I mean—drew up this chart. He wanted to be sure that you would know your real family, even though he gave you his own name.”

  Roger sighed, thinking of the Reverend, and the small silver-framed picture on his bureau, with the smiling likeness of an unknown young man, darkhaired in World War II RAF uniform.

  “Yes, I know that, too. My family name was MacKenzie. Are you going to tell me I’m connected to some of the MacKenzies you…er, knew? I don’t see any of those names on this chart.”

  Claire acted as though she hadn’t heard him, tracing a finger down the spidery hand-drawn lines of the genealogy.

  “Mr. Wakefield was a terrible stickler for accuracy,” she murmured, as though to herself. “He wouldn’t want any mistakes.” Her finger came to a halt on the page.

  “Here,” she said. “This is where it happened. Below this point”—her finger swept down the page—“everything is right. These were your parents, and your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and so on. But not above.” The finger swept upward.

  Roger bent over the chart, then looked up, moss-green eyes thoughtful.

  “This one? William Buccleigh MacKenzie, born 1744, of William John MacKenzie and Sarah Innes. Died 1782.”

  Claire shook her head. “Died 1744, aged two months, of smallpox.” She looked up, and the golden eyes met his with a force that sent a shiver down his spine. “Yours wasn’t the first adoption in that family, you know,” she said. Her finger tapped the entry. “He needed a wet nurse,” she said. “His own mother was dead—so he was given to a family that had lost a baby. They called him by the name of the child they had lost—that was common—and I don’t suppose anyone wanted to call attention to his ancestry by recording the new child in the parish register. He would have been baptized at birth, after all; it wasn’t necessary to do it again. Colum told me where they placed him.”

  “Geillis Duncan’s son,” he said slowly. “The witch’s child.”

  “That’s right.” She gazed at him appraisingly, head cocked to one side. “I knew it must be, when I saw you. The eyes, you know. They’re hers.”

  Roger sat down, feeling suddenly quite cold, in spite of the bookshelf blocking the draft, and the newly kindled fire on the hearth.

  “You’re sure of this?” he said, but of course she was sure. Assuming that the whole story was not a fabrication, the elaborate construction of a diseased mind. He glanced up at her, sitting unruffled with her whisky, composed as though about to order cheese straws.

  Diseased mind? Dr. Claire Beauchamp-Randall, chief of staff at a large, important hospital? Raving insanity, rampant delusions? Easier to believe himself insane. In fact, he was beginning to believe just that.

  He took a deep breath and placed both hands flat on the chart, blotting out the entry for William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

  “Well, it’s interesting all right, and I suppose I’m glad you told me. But it doesn’t really change anything, does it? Except that I suppose I can tear off the top half of this genealogy and throw it away. After all, we don’t know where Geillis Duncan came from, nor the man who fathered her child; you seem sure it wasn’t poor old Arthur.”

  Claire shook her head, a distant look in her eyes.

  “Oh, no, it wasn’t Arthur Duncan. It was Dougal MacKenzie who fathered Geilie’s child. That was the real reason she was killed. Not witchcraft. But Colum MacKenzie couldn’t let it be known that his brother had had an adulterous affair with the fiscal’s wife. And she wanted to marry Dougal; I think perhaps she threatened the MacKenzies with the truth about Hamish.”

  “Hamish? Oh, Colum’s son. Yes, I remember.” Roger rubbed his forehead. His head was starting to spin.

  “Not Colum’s son,” Claire corrected. “Dougal’s. Colum couldn’t sire children, but Dougal could—and did. Hamish was the heir to the chieftainship of clan MacKenzie; Colum would have killed anyone who threatened Hamish—and did.”

  She drew a deep breath. “And that,” she said, “leads to the second reason why I told you the story.”

  Roger buried both hands in his hair, staring down at the table, where the lines of the genealogical chart seemed to writhe like mocking snakes, forked tongues flickering between the names.

  “Geillis Duncan,” he said hoarsely. “She had a vaccination scar.”

  “Yes. It was that, finally, that made me come back to Scotland. When I left with Frank, I swore I would never come back. I knew I could never forget, but I c
ould bury what I knew; I could stay away, and never seek to know what happened after I left. It seemed the least I could do, for both of them, for Frank and Jamie. And for the baby coming.” Her lips pressed tightly together for a moment.

  “But Geilie saved my life, at the trial in Cranesmuir. Perhaps she was doomed herself in any case; I think she believed so. But she threw away any chance she might have had, in order to save me. And she left me a message. Dougal gave it to me, in a cave in the Highlands, when he brought me the news that Jamie was in prison. There were two pieces to the message. A sentence, ‘I do not know if it is possible, but I think so,’ and a sequence of four numbers—one, nine, six, and eight.”

  “Nineteen sixty-eight,” Roger said, with the feeling that this was a dream. Surely he would be waking soon. “This year. What did she mean, she thought it was possible?”

  “To go back. Through the stones. She hadn’t tried, but she thought I could. And she was right, of course.” Claire turned and picked up her whisky from the table. She stared at Roger across the rim of the glass, eyes the same color as the contents. “This is 1968; the year she went back herself. Except that I think she hasn’t yet gone.”

  The glass slipped in Roger’s hand, and he barely caught it in time.

  “What…here? But she…why not…you can’t tell…” He was sputtering, thoughts jarred into incoherency.

  “I don’t know,” Claire pointed out. “But I think so. I’m fairly sure she was Scots, and the odds are good that she came through somewhere in the Highlands. Granted that there are any number of standing stones, we know that Craigh na Dun is a passage—for those that can use it. Besides,” she added, with the air of one presenting the final argument, “Fiona’s seen her.”

  “Fiona?” This, Roger felt, was simply too much. The crowning absurdity. Anything else he could manage to believe—time passages, clan treachery, historical revelations—but bringing Fiona into it was more than his reason could be expected to stand. He looked pleadingly at Claire. “Tell me you don’t mean that,” he begged. “Not Fiona.”

  Claire’s mouth twitched at one corner. “I’m afraid so,” she said, not without sympathy. “I asked her—about the Druid group that her grandmother belonged to, you know. She’s been sworn to secrecy, of course, but I knew quite a bit about them already, and well…” She shrugged, mildly apologetic. “It wasn’t too difficult to get her to talk. She told me that there’d been another woman asking questions—a tall, fair-haired woman, with very striking green eyes. Fiona said the woman reminded her of someone,” she added delicately, carefully not looking at him, “but she couldn’t think who.”

  Roger merely groaned, and bending at the waist, collapsed slowly forward until his forehead rested on the table. He closed his eyes, feeling the cool hardness of the wood under his head.

  “Did Fiona know who she was?” he asked, eyes still closed.

  “Her name is Gillian Edgars,” Claire replied. He heard her rising, crossing the room, adding another tot of whisky to her glass. She came back and stood by the table. He could feel her gaze on the back of his neck.

  “I’ll leave it to you.” Claire said quietly. “It’s your right to say. Shall I look for her?”

  Roger lifted his head off the table and blinked at her incredulously. “Shall you look for her?” he said. “If this—if it’s all true—then we have to find her, don’t we? If she’s going back to be burned alive? Of course you have to find her!” he burst out. “How could you consider anything else?”

  “And if I do find her?” she replied. She placed a slender hand on the grubby chart and raised her eyes to his. “What happens to you?” she asked softly.

  * * *

  He looked around helplessly, at the bright, cluttered study, with the wall of miscellanea, the chipped old teapot on the ancient oak table. Solid as…He gripped his thighs, clutching the rough corduroy as though for reassurance that he was as solid as the chair on which he sat.

  “But…I’m real!” he burst out. “I can’t just…evaporate!”

  Claire raised her brows consideringly. “I don’t know that you would. I have no idea what would happen. Perhaps you would never have existed? In which case, you oughtn’t to be too agitated now. Perhaps the part of you that makes you unique, your soul or whatever you want to call it—perhaps that’s fated to exist in any case, and you would still be you, though born of a slightly different lineage. After all, how much of your physical makeup can be due to ancestors six generations back? Half? Ten percent?” She shrugged, and pursed her lips, looking him over carefully.

  “Your eyes come from Geilie, as I told you. But I see Dougal in you, too. No specific feature, though you have the MacKenzie cheekbones; Bree has them, too. No, it’s something more subtle, something in the way you move; a grace, a suddenness—no…” She shook her head. “I can’t describe it. But it’s there. Is it something you need, to be who you are? Could you do without that bit from Dougal?”

  She rose heavily, looking her age for the first time since he had met her.

  “I’ve spent more than twenty years looking for answers, Roger, and I can tell you only one thing: There aren’t any answers, only choices. I’ve made a number of them myself, and no one can tell me whether they were right or wrong. Master Raymond perhaps, though I don’t suppose he would; he was a man who believed in mysteries.

  “I can see the right of it only far enough to know that I must tell you—and leave the choice to you.”

  He picked up the glass and drained the rest of the whisky.

  The Year of our Lord 1968. The year when Geillis Duncan stepped into the circle of standing stones. The year she went to meet her fate beneath the rowan trees in the hills near Leoch. An illegitimate child—and death by fire.

  He rose and wandered up and down the rows of books that lined the study. Books filled with history, that mocking and mutable subject.

  No answers, only choices.

  Restless, he fingered the books on the top shelf. These were the histories of the Jacobite movement, the stories of the Rebellions, the ’15 and the ’45. Claire had known a number of the men and women described in these books. Had fought and suffered with them, to save a people strange to her. Had lost all she held dear in the effort. And in the end, had failed. But the choice had been hers, as now it was his.

  Was there a chance that this was a dream, a delusion of some kind? He stole a glance at Claire. She lay back in her chair, eyes closed, motionless but for the beating of her pulse, barely visible in the hollow of her throat. No. He could, for a moment, convince himself that it was make-believe, but only while he looked away from her. However much he wanted to believe otherwise, he could not look at her and doubt a word of what she said.

  He spread his hands flat on the table, then turned them over, seeing the maze of lines that crossed his palms. Was it only his own fate that lay here in his cupped hands, or did he hold an unknown woman’s life as well?

  No answers. He closed his hands gently, as though holding something small trapped inside his fists, and made his choice.

  “Let’s find her,” he said.

  There was no sound from the still figure in the wing chair, and no movement save the rise and fall of the rounded breast. Claire was asleep.

  48

  WITCH-HUNT

  The old-fashioned buzzer whirred somewhere in the depths of the flat. It wasn’t the best part of town, nor was it the worst. Working-class houses, for the most part, some, like this one, divided into two or three flats. A hand-lettered notice under the buzzer read MCHENRY UPSTAIRS—RING TWICE. Roger carefully pressed the buzzer once more, then wiped his hand on his trousers. His palms were sweating, which annoyed him considerably.

  There was a trough of yellow jonquils by the doorstep, half-dead for lack of water. The tips of the blade-shaped leaves were brown and curling, and the frilly yellow heads drooped disconsolately near his shoe.

  Claire saw them, too. “Perhaps no one’s home,” she said, stooping to touch the d
ry soil in the trough. “These haven’t been watered in over a week.”

  Roger felt a mild wave of relief at the thought; whether he believed Geillis Duncan was Gillian Edgars or not, he hadn’t been looking forward to this visit. He was turning to go when the door suddenly opened behind him, with a screech of sticking wood that brought his heart into his mouth.

  “Aye?” The man who answered the door squinted at them, eyes swollen in a flushed, heavy face shadowed with unshaven beard.

  “Er…We’re sorry to disturb your sleep, sir,” said Roger, making an effort to calm himself. His stomach felt slightly hollow. “We’re looking for a Miss Gillian Edgars. Is this her residence?”

  The man rubbed a stubby, black-furred hand over his head, making the hair stick up in belligerent spikes.