An Echo in the Bone, Page 26

  At that point, Mr. Christie had declared, first, his intent to confess to the murder of his daughter—of which I was accused—secondly, his love for me, and thirdly, his intent to be executed in my place. All of which made his sudden resurrection not merely surprising but more than slightly awkward.

  Adding to the awkwardness was the question as to what—if anything—he knew about the fate of his son, Allan, who had been responsible for Malva Christie’s death. The circumstances were nothing that any father ought to have to hear, and panic gripped me at the thought that I might have to tell him.

  I glanced at him again. His face was deeply lined, but he was neither gaunt nor overtly haunted. He wore no wig, though his wiry salt-and-pepper hair was close-clipped as always, matching his neatly trimmed beard. My face tingled, and I barely kept myself from scrubbing my hand across my mouth to erase the feeling. He was clearly disturbed—well, so was I—but had got himself back under control, and opened the door of the ordinary for me with impeccable courtesy. Only the twitch of a muscle beside his left eye betrayed him.

  I felt as though my entire body was twitching, but Phaedre, serving in the taproom, glanced at me with no more than mild interest and a cordial nod. Of course, she’d never met Thomas Christie, and while she’d doubtless heard about the scandal following my arrest, she wouldn’t connect the gentleman accompanying me with it.

  We found a table by the window in the dining room, and sat down.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said abruptly. “What did you mean, you thought I was dead?”

  He opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by Phaedre, who came to serve us, smiling pleasantly.

  “I get you something, sir, ma’am? You wanting food? We’ve a nice ham today, roast taters, and Mrs. Symonds’s special mustard ’n raisin sauce to go along of it.”

  “No,” Mr. Christie said. “I—just a cup of cider, if ye please.”

  “Whisky,” I said. “A lot of it.”

  Mr. Christie looked scandalized, but Phaedre only laughed and whisked off, the grace of her movement attracting the quiet admiration of most of the male patrons.

  “Ye haven’t changed,” he observed. His eyes traveled over me, intense, taking in every detail of my appearance. “I ought to have known ye by your hair.”

  His voice was disapproving, but tinged with a reluctant amusement; he had always been vociferous in his disapproval of my refusal to wear a cap or otherwise restrain my hair. “Wanton,” he’d called it.

  “Yes, you should,” I said, reaching up to smooth the hair in question, which was considerably the worse for recent encounters. “You didn’t recognize me ’til I turned round, though, did you? What made you speak to me?”

  He hesitated, but then nodded toward my basket, which I’d set on the floor beside my chair.

  “I saw that ye had one of my tracts.”

  “What?” I said blankly, but looked where he was looking and saw the singed pamphlet on Divine Compassion sticking out from under a cabbage. I reached down and pulled it out, only now noticing the author: by Mr. T. W. Christie, MA, University of Edinburgh.

  “What does the ‘W’ stand for?” I asked, laying it down.

  He blinked.

  “Warren,” he replied rather gruffly. “Where in God’s name did ye come from?”

  “My father always claimed he’d found me under a cabbage leaf in the garden,” I replied flippantly. “Or did you mean today? If so—the King’s Arms.”

  He was beginning to look a little less shocked, his normal irritation at my lack of womanly decorum drawing his face back into its usual stern lines.

  “Don’t be facetious. I was told that ye were dead,” he said, accusingly. “You and your entire family were burnt up in a fire.”

  Phaedre, delivering the drinks, glanced at me, eyebrows raised.

  “She ain’t looking too crispy round the edges, sir, if you pardon my mention of it.”

  “Thank ye for the observation,” he said between his teeth. Phaedre exchanged a glance of amusement with me, and went off again, shaking her head.

  “Who told you that?”

  “A man named McCreary.”

  I must have looked blank, for he added, “from Brownsville. I met him here—in Wilmington, I mean—in late January. He had just come down from the mountain, he said, and told me of the fire. Was there a fire?”

  “Well, yes, there was,” I said slowly, wondering whether—and how much—to tell him of the truth of that. Very little, in a public place, I decided. “Maybe it was Mr. McCreary, then, who placed the notice of the fire in the newspaper—but he can’t have.” The original notice had appeared in 1776, Roger had said—nearly a year before the fire.

  “I placed it,” Christie said. Now it was my turn to blink.

  “You what? When?” I took a good-sized mouthful of whisky, feeling that I needed it more than ever.

  “Directly I heard of it. Or—well, no,” he corrected. “A few days thereafter. I … was very much distressed at the news,” he added, lowering his eyes and looking away from me for the first time since we’d sat down.

  “Ah. I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my own voice, and feeling rather apologetic—though why I should feel apologetic for not having been burnt up …

  He cleared his throat.

  “Yes. Well. It, er, seemed to me that some … something should be done. Some formal observance of your—your passing.” He looked up then, gray eyes direct. “I could not abide the thought that you—all of you,” he added, but it was clearly an afterthought, “should simply vanish from the earth, with no formal marking of the—the event.”

  He took a deep breath, and a tentative sip of the cider.

  “Even if a proper funeral had been held, there would be no point in my returning to Fraser’s Ridge, even if I—well. I could not. So I thought I would at least make a record of the event here. After all,” he added more softly, looking away again, “I could not lay flowers on your grave.”

  The whisky had steadied me a bit, but also rasped my throat and made it difficult to talk when hampered by emotion. I reached out and touched his hand briefly, then cleared my throat, finding momentarily neutral ground.

  “Your hand,” I said. “How is it?”

  He looked up, surprised, but the taut lines of his face relaxed a bit.

  “Very well, I thank you. See?” He turned over his right hand, displaying a large Z-shaped scar upon the palm, well healed but still pink.

  “Let me see.”

  His hand was cold. With an assumption of casualness, I took it in mine, turning it, bending the fingers to assess their flexibility and degree of movement. He was right: it was doing well; the movement was nearly normal.

  “I—did the exercises you set me,” he blurted. “I do them every day.”

  I looked up to find him regarding me with a sort of anguished solemnity, his cheeks now flushed above his beard, and realized that this ground was not nearly so neutral as I’d thought. Before I could let go his hand, it turned in mine, covering my fingers—not tightly, but sufficiently that I couldn’t free myself without a noticeable effort.

  “Your husband.” He stopped dead, having obviously not thought of Jamie at all to this point. “He is alive, too?”

  “Er, yes.”

  To his credit, he didn’t grimace at this news, but nodded, exhaling.

  “I am—glad to hear it.”

  He sat in silence for a moment, looking at his undrunk cider. He was still holding my hand. Without looking up, he said in a low voice, “Does he … know? What I—how I—I did not tell him the reason for my confession. Did you?”

  “You mean your”—I groped for some suitable way of putting it—“your, um, very gallant feelings toward me? Well, yes, he does; he was very sympathetic toward you. He knowing from experience what it’s like to be in love with me, I mean,” I added tartly.

  He almost laughed at that, which gave me an opportunity to extricate my fingers. He did not, I noticed, inform
me that he wasn’t in love with me any longer. Oh, dear.

  “Well, anyway, we aren’t dead,” I said, clearing my throat again. “What about you? Last time I saw you …”

  “Ah.” He looked less than happy, but gathered himself, changing gears, and nodded. “Your rather hasty departure from the Cruizer left Gover nor Martin without an amanuensis. Discovering that I was to some degree literate”—his mouth twisted a little—“and could write a fair hand, thanks to your ministrations, he had me removed from the brig.”

  I wasn’t surprised at that. Driven completely out of his colony, Governor Martin was obliged to conduct his business from the tiny captain’s cabin of the British ship on which he had taken refuge. Such business perforce consisted entirely of letters—all of which must be not only composed, drafted, and fair-copied but then reproduced several times each. A copy was required first for the governor’s own official correspondence files, then for each person or entity having some interest in the subject of the letter, and, finally, several additional copies of any letters going to England or Europe must be made, because they would be sent by different ships, in hopes that at least one copy would make it through, should the others be sunk, seized by pirates or privateers, or otherwise lost in transit.

  My hand ached at the mere memory of it. The exigencies of bureaucracy in a time before the magic of Xerox had kept me from rotting in a cell; no wonder they had freed Tom Christie from durance vile as well.

  “You see?” I said, rather pleased. “If I hadn’t fixed your hand, he’d likely have had you either executed on the spot or at least sent back to shore and immured in some dungeon.”

  “I am duly grateful,” he said, with extreme dryness. “I was not, at the time.”

  Christie had spent several months as de facto secretary to the governor. In late November, though, a ship had arrived from England, bearing orders to the governor—essentially ordering him to subdue the colony, though offering no troops, armament, or useful suggestions as to how this might be managed—and an official secretary.

  “At this point, the governor was faced with the prospect of disposing of me. We had … become acquainted, working in such close quarters …”

  “And as you were no longer quite an anonymous murderer, he didn’t want to yank the quill out of your hand and hang you from the yardarm,” I finished for him. “Yes, he’s actually rather a kind man.”

  “He is,” Christie said thoughtfully. “He has not had an easy time of it, poor fellow.”

  I nodded. “He told you about his little boys?”

  “Aye, he did.” His lips compressed—not out of anger, but to control his own emotion. Martin and his wife had lost three small sons, one after another, to the plagues and fevers of the colony; small wonder if hearing of the governor’s pain had reopened Tom Christie’s own wounds. He shook his head a little, though, and returned to the subject of his deliverance.

  “I had … told him a bit about … about my daughter.” He picked up the barely touched cup of cider and drank half of it off at a swallow, as if dying of thirst. “I admitted privately to him that my confession had been false—though I stated also that I was certain of your innocence,” he assured me. “And if you should ever be arrested again for the crime, my confession would stand.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said, and wondered with still greater uneasiness whether he knew who had killed Malva. He had to have suspected, I thought—but that was a long way from having to know, let alone having to know why. And no one knew where Allan was now—save me, Jamie, and Young Ian.

  Governor Martin had received this admission with some relief, and decided that the only thing to do in the circumstances was to put Christie ashore, there to be dealt with by the civil authorities.

  “There aren’t any civil authorities anymore,” I said. “Are there?”

  He shook his head.

  “None capable of dealing with such a matter. There are still gaols and sheriffs, but neither courts nor magistrates. Under the circumstances”—he almost smiled, dour though the expression was—“I thought it a waste of time to try to find someone to whom to surrender myself.”

  “But you said you had sent a copy of your confession to the newspaper,” I said. “Weren’t you, er, received coldly by the people in New Bern?”

  “By the grace of divine Providence, the newspaper there had ceased its operations before my confession was received by them, the printer being a Loyalist. I believe Mr. Ashe and his friends called upon him, and he wisely decided to find another mode of business.”

  “Very wise,” I said dryly. John Ashe was a friend of Jamie’s, a leading light of the local Sons of Liberty, and the man who had instigated the burning of Fort Johnston and effectively driven Governor Martin into the sea.

  “There was some gossip,” he said, looking away again, “but it was overwhelmed by the rush of public events. No one quite knew what had happened on Fraser’s Ridge, and after a time it became fixed in everyone’s mind simply that some personal tragedy had befallen me. People came to regard me with a sort of … sympathy.” His mouth twisted; he wasn’t the sort to receive sympathy with any graciousness.

  “You seem to be thriving,” I said, with a nod at his suit. “Or at least you aren’t sleeping in the gutter and living off discarded fish heads from the docks. I had no idea that the tract-writing business was profitable.”

  He’d gone back to his normal color during the previous conversation, but flushed up again at this—with annoyance, this time.

  “It isn’t,” he snapped. “I take pupils. And I—I preach of a Sunday.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone better for the job,” I said, amused. “You’ve always had a talent for telling everyone what’s wrong with them in Biblical terms. Have you become a clergyman, then?”

  His color grew deeper, but he choked down his choler and answered me evenly.

  “I was nearly destitute upon my arrival here. Fish heads, as you say—and the occasional bit of bread or soup given by a New Light congregation. I came in order to eat, but remained for the service out of courtesy. I thus heard a sermon given by the Reverend Peterson. It—remained with me. I sought him out, and we … spoke. One thing led to another.” He glanced up at me, his eyes fierce. “The Lord does answer prayer, ye know.”

  “What had you prayed for?” I asked, intrigued.

  That took him back a bit, though it had been an innocent question, asked from simple curiosity.

  “I—I—” He broke off and stared at me, frowning. “You are a most uncomfortable woman!”

  “You wouldn’t be the first person to think so,” I assured him. “And I don’t mean to pry. I just … wondered.”

  I could see the urge to get up and leave warring with the compulsion to bear witness to whatever had happened to him. But he was a stubborn man, and he stayed put.

  “I … asked why,” he said at last, very evenly. “That’s all.”

  “Well, it worked for Job,” I observed. He looked startled, and I nearly laughed; he was always startled at the revelation that anyone other than himself had read the Bible. He got a grip, though, and glowered at me in something more like his usual fashion.

  “And now you are here,” he said, making it sound like an accusation. “I suppose your husband has formed a militia—or joined one. I have had enough of war. I am surprised that your husband has not.”

  “I don’t think it’s precisely a taste for war,” I said. I spoke with an edge, but something in him compelled me to add, “It’s that he feels he was born to it.”

  Something flickered deep in Tom Christie’s eyes—surprise? Acknowledgment?

  “He is,” he said quietly. “But surely—” He didn’t finish the thought, but instead asked abruptly, “What are you doing here, though? In Wilmington?”

  “Looking for a ship,” I said. “We’re going to Scotland.”

  I’d always had a talent for startling him, but this one took the biscuit. He had lifted his mug to drink, but upon hea
ring my declaration, abruptly spewed cider across the table. The subsequent choking and wheezing attracted a good bit of attention, and I sat back, trying to look less conspicuous.

  “Er … we’ll be going to Edinburgh, for my husband’s printing press,” I said. “Is there anyone you’d like me to see for you? Deliver a message, I mean? You have a brother there, I think you said.”

  His head shot up and he glared at me, eyes streaming. I felt a spasm of horror at the sudden recollection and could have bitten my tongue off at the root. His brother had had an affair with Tom’s wife while Tom was imprisoned in the Highlands after the Rising, and his wife had then poisoned his brother and subsequently been executed for witchcraft.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, low-voiced. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t—”

  He seized my hand in both of his, so hard and so abruptly that I gasped, and a few heads turned curiously in our direction. He paid no attention, but leaned toward me across the table.

  “Listen to me,” he said, low and fierce. “I have loved three women. One was a witch and a whore, the second only a whore. Ye well may be a witch yourself, but it makes nay whit o’ difference. The love of you has led me to my salvation, and to what I thought was my peace, once I thought ye dead.”

  He stared at me and shook his head slowly, his mouth going tight for a moment in the seam of his beard.

  “And here you are.”

  “Er … yes.” I felt once more as though I should apologize for not being dead, but didn’t.

  He drew a deep breath and let it out in a sigh.

  “I shall have no peace while ye live, woman.”

  Then he lifted my hand and kissed it, stood up, and walked away.

  “Mind,” he said, turning at the door to look back at me over his shoulder, “I dinna say I regret it.”

  I picked up the glass of whisky and drained it.

  I WENT ABOUT THE REST of my errands in a daze—not entirely induced by whisky. I hadn’t any idea what to think of the resurrection of Tom Christie, but was thoroughly unsettled by it. Still, there seemed nothing, really, to do about him, and so I went on to the shop of Stephen Moray, a silversmith from Fife, to commission a pair of surgical scissors. Luckily, he proved an intelligent man, who appeared to understand both my specifications and the purpose behind them, and promised to have the scissors made within three days. Heartened by this, I ventured a slightly more problematic commission.

  “Needles?” Moray knit his white brows in puzzlement. “Ye dinna require a silversmith for—”

  “Not sewing needles. These are longer, quite thin, and without an eye. They have a medical purpose. And I should like you to make them from this.”

  His eyes went wide as I laid what appeared to be a gold nugget the size of a walnut on the counter. It was in fact a bit of one of the French ingots, hacked off and hammered into a lump, then rubbed with dirt by way of disguise.

  “My husband won it in a card game,” I said, with the tone of mingled pride and apology that seemed appropriate to such an admission. I didn’t want anyone thinking that there was gold on Fraser’s Ridge—in any form. Boosting Jamie’s reputation as a card player wasn’t likely to do any harm; he was already well known—if not quite notorious—for his abilities in that line.

  Moray frowned a bit over the written specifications for the acupuncture needles, but agreed to make them. Luckily, he appeared never to have heard of voodoo dolls, or I might have had a bit more trouble.

  With the visit to the silversmith and a quick trip through the market square for spring onions, cheese, peppermint leaves, and anything else available in the herbal line, it was late afternoon before I came back to the King’s Arms.

  Jamie was playing cards in the taproom, with Young Ian watching over his shoulder, but he saw me come in and, giving over his hand to Ian, came to take my basket, following me up the stairs to our room.

  I turned round inside the door, but before I could speak, he said, “I know Tom Christie’s alive. I met him in the street.”

  “He kissed me,” I blurted.

  “Aye, I heard,” he said, eyeing me with what might have been amusement. For some reason, I found that very annoying. He saw that, and the amusement deepened.

  “Like it, did ye?”

  “It wasn’t funny!”

  The amusement didn’t go away, but it retreated a bit.

  “Did ye like it?” he repeated, but now there was curiosity in his voice, rather than teasing.

  “No.” I turned away abruptly. “That—I hadn’t time to … to think about it.”

  Without warning, he put a hand behind my neck and kissed me briefly. And by simple reflex, I slapped him. Not hard—I’d tried to pull back even as I struck—and clearly I hadn’t hurt him. I was as surprised and discomfited as though I’d knocked him flat.

  “Doesna take much thought, does it?” he said lightly, and stepped back, surveying me with interest.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling simultaneously mortified and angry—and angrier still in that I didn’t understand why I was angry in the slightest. “I didn’t mean to—I’m sorry.”

  He tilted his head to one side, eyeing me.

  “Had I better go and kill him?”