“No,” Jamie said mildly. “Does it matter? Ye took me in without question and tended me—will ye not let me do the same for you?”
A dull red washed her face and she looked down at her battered shoes. The side of one had come unstitched and he could see her grimy little toe. She would have taken back her hand, but he wouldn’t let go.
“Thee means …”
“I mean that I offer ye the succor and refuge of my home, just as ye did for me. Of course, ye rubbed hellfire into my backside, too, and I dinna think ye require any such service, thank God. But I hope that ye might find the Ridge pleasant, and if so, I should be honored if ye would consent to live among us.”
The red burned more fiercely.
“I could not. I—I should be a scandal to thy tenants.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
“Were ye planning to get up in Meeting and tell everyone what ye were obliged to do to save your bairns from starvin’?”
She gaped at him.
“Meeting? There are Friends here?” She looked as though she wanted to stand up and run, and he tightened his grasp a little.
“Just Rachel,” he assured her. “But we do have a Meeting House, and she’s there for Meeting on First Day with anyone who chooses to join her. She isna going to be shocked, is she?”
The flush faded slightly from her thin cheeks.
“No,” she admitted, and a tiny, rueful smile touched her lips. “She already knows the worst. So does thy nephew, thy sister, all of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Joseph Brant, and any number of Mohawk Indians.”
“Well, then,” he said, and letting go of her hand, patted it. “Thee has come home, Friend.”
117
Fungus, Beavers, and the Beautiful Stars
BEYOND OUR CORDIAL INTRODUCTION on the landslide, I’d seen little of the Sachem. Fanny and Agnes were in what we called the children’s room, Silvia and her girls were occupying Brianna and Roger’s room, and the third bedchamber on the second floor was a guest room, though more often used for patients who needed to be kept longer than overnight. I’d offered him a bed in the third-floor attic, which was now weatherproofed and walled; we could tack hides or oiled parchment over the unglassed windows. He’d declined with grace, though, saying that he would remain with the wolves for now—that, apparently, being his term for the miscellaneous Murrays. I wasn’t sure whether he was drawn by having Ian to speak Mohawk with—or by Jenny.
“SHALL I SPEAK to yon man?” Jamie had asked Ian, a week or two into the Sachem’s visit. Jamie had come with me on a visit to the Crombies, and we’d stopped to pass the time of day with Ian and Rachel on our way home, finding the Sachem sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, watching Jenny churning buttermilk.
“If ye mean ye think I should ask him his intentions,” Ian said, “I did. He laughed, and told my mother. She laughed.”
“Och, aye, then,” Jamie muttered, but cut his eyes sideways at the Sachem, who smiled cheerfully at him. He turned and said something to Jenny, who nodded and went on churning. He got up and came down the steps toward us.
“Honored witch,” he said, bowing. “Are you at leisure?”
“Yes,” I said, warily. “Why?”
“I have found a strange thing—an ohnekèren’ta, but one I do not know. Would you come with me to look at it? I think it has some power, but I can’t tell whether it is for good or for evil.”
“A toadstool,” Ian said, in answer to my questioning glance. “Or maybe a mushroom; I havena seen it.”
Jamie was radiating caution, but Ian nodded to him.
He gave a one-shouldered shrug, saying in Gaelic, “If he was up to something, I’d know by now.”
“Exactly so,” said the Sachem, beaming.
Jamie’s brows went up. “Ye have the Gàidhlig?”
“Why, no,” said the Sachem. He glanced over his shoulder at Jenny. “But perhaps I will learn.”
HE TOOK ME to the Saint’s Pool, the spring with a large white stone at its head.
“Who is the saint of this place?” he asked, kneeling in the grass to drink from a cupped hand. “I heard stories of many saints, in London. You know the one called Lawrence? I saw him in a window. He was roasted alive on a gridiron, but made jokes as his flesh steamed and split and his blood fried. He would have been a good Mohawk,” he said with approval.
“I expect he would,” I said, trying to swallow the thought that his very specific description left little doubt that he’d actually seen someone being burned alive. For that matter, so had I …. I swallowed harder.
“As for the saint of this pool … in the Scottish Highlands, a pool like this would … er … belong to the local saint. Here, I think it’s only that people sometimes come to pray, because it reminds them of places like this in Scotland. But I suppose they might pray here to whoever they thought might help them.”
“And do you think the dead concern themselves with the living?”
I hesitated for a moment, but while I was in total ignorance of the mechanics, I didn’t doubt the fact.
“Yes, I do. So do most Highlanders. They have a very intimate relationship with their dead.” Out of curiosity, I asked, “Do you? Think that the dead concern themselves with the living?”
“Some of them do.” Rising, he beckoned me to follow him. The fungus in question was growing a short distance away, in a crevice in a dead beech log. There was a large cluster, the individual mushrooms balanced on long, delicate stems, both crimped caps and stems a noticeable shade of purplish crimson.
“I’ve seen these before,” I said, gathering up my skirt in order to squat beside him in front of the log. “People call them bleeding fairy helmets, or sometimes just blood-spots.” They were, in fact, just about the shade of venous blood, and if you cut the stems, a very convincing bloodlike liquid oozed out of them.
“I don’t know if they’re poisonous, but I wouldn’t feed them to anyone.” Assuming any of the Highlanders on the Ridge would try one. Having grown up in a food-deprived habitat where oatmeal was not just for breakfast, most of the older people were deeply suspicious of anything strange-looking or unfamiliar—particularly things of a vegetable nature.
“No,” the Sachem said thoughtfully. “Their blood is sticky—like real blood, you know—and I’ve seen that used to help seal small wounds, but I’ve never seen animals eat them. Not even pigs.”
“So you are familiar with them?”
“Oh, yes. It’s that, that I have never seen before.” Crouching beside me, he extended a long, knobbly finger toward an isolated patch of the mushroom. The caps had opened fully, like tiny umbrellas, but each one sported a tangled headdress of thin, slightly iridescent pale spikes, as though the cap had suddenly grown a crop of tiny needles.
I didn’t touch them, but took out my spectacles for a closer look.
The Sachem smiled at me. “You know the big owls?” he said, sticking his forefingers up beside his ears. “The ones who call Hoo-hoo, and then another answers Hoo? You hear them most in the early days of winter, when they breed.”