Unseeing, I traced the line of the drawing with my finger, over and over, as the dark rose up around me and the realities of my heart stood clear in the dusky light. No, I would not wish Brianna here. But that didn’t mean I didn’t miss her.
* * *
I finished my notes eventually, and sat quietly for a moment. I should go and begin making supper, I knew, but the weariness of my ordeal still dragged at me, making me unwilling to move. All my muscles ached, and the bruise on my knee throbbed. All I really wanted to do was to crawl back into bed.
Instead, I picked up the skull, which I had set down next to my casebook on the table. I ran my finger gently over the rounded cranium. It was a thoroughly macabre desk ornament, I would admit that, but I felt rather attached to it, nonetheless. I had always found bones beautiful, of man or beast; stark and graceful remnants of life reduced to its foundations.
I thought suddenly of something I had not remembered in many years; a small dark closet of a room in Paris, hidden behind an apothecary’s shop. The walls covered with a honeycomb of shelves, each cell holding a polished skull. Animals of many kinds, from shrews to wolves, mice to bears.
And with my hand on the head of my unknown friend, I heard Master Raymond’s voice, as clear in memory as though he stood beside me.
“Sympathy?” he had said as I touched the high curve of a polished elk’s skull. “It is an unusual emotion to feel for a bone, madonna.”
But he had known what I meant. I knew he did, for when I asked him why he kept these skulls, he had smiled and said, “They are company, of a sort.”
I knew what he meant, too; for surely the gentleman whose skull I kept had been company for me, in a very dark and lonely place. Not for the first time, I wondered whether he had in fact had anything to do with the apparition I had seen on the mountain; the Indian with his face painted black.
The ghost—if that is what he was—had not smiled or spoken aloud. I hadn’t seen his teeth, which would be my only point of comparison with the skull I held—for I found that I was holding it, rubbing a thumb over the jagged edge of a cracked incisor. I lifted the skull to the light, examining it closely by the soft sunset light.
The teeth on the one side had been shattered; cracked and splintered as though he had been struck violently in the mouth, perhaps by a rock or a club—the stock of a gun? On the other side they were whole; in very good condition, actually. I was no expert but thought the skull was that of a mature man; one in his late thirties or early forties. A man of that age should show a good bit of wear to his teeth, given the Indians’ diet of ground corn, which—owing to the manner of preparation, pounded between flat stones—contained quite a bit of ground stone as well.
The incisors and canine on the good side were scarcely worn at all, though. I turned the skull over, to judge the abrasion of the molars, and stopped cold.
Very cold, in spite of the fire at my back. As cold as I had been in the lost, fireless dark, alone on the mountain with a dead man’s head. For the late sun now struck sparks from my hands: from the silver band of my wedding ring—and from the silver fillings in my late companion’s mouth.
I sat staring for a moment, then turned the skull over and set it gently down on the desk, careful as though it were made of glass.
“My God,” I said, all tiredness forgotten. “My God,” I said, to the empty eyes and the lopsided grin. “Who were you?”
* * *
“Who do ye think he can have been?” Jamie touched the skull gingerly. We had no more than moments; Duncan had gone to the privy, Ian to feed the pig. I couldn’t bring myself to wait, though—I had had to tell someone at once.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Except, of course, that he has to have been someone…like me.” A violent shiver ran over me. Jamie glanced at me, and frowned.
“Ye havena take a chill, have ye, Sassenach?”
“No.” I smiled weakly up at him. “Goose walking on my grave, I expect.”
He plucked my shawl from the hook by the door and swung it around me. His hands stayed on my shoulders, warm and comforting.
“It means the one thing else, doesn’t it?” he asked quietly. “It means there is another…place. Perhaps nearby.”
Another stone circle—or something like it. I had thought of that, too, and the notion made me shudder once again. Jamie looked thoughtfully at the skull, then drew the handkerchief from his sleeve and draped it gently over the empty eyes.
“I’ll bury him after supper,” he said.
“Oh, supper.” I pushed my hair behind my ear, trying to get my scattered thoughts to focus on food. “Yes, I’ll see if I can find some eggs. That will be quick.”
“Dinna trouble yourself, Sassenach.” Jamie peered into the pot on the hearth. “We can eat this.”
This time, the shudder was purely one of fastidiousness.
“Ugh,” I said. Jamie grinned at me.
“Nothing wrong wi’ good barley crowdie, is there?”
“Assuming there is such a thing,” I replied, looking into the pot with distaste. “This smells more like distiller’s mash.” Made with wet grain, insufficiently cooked and left standing, the cold, scummy soup was already giving off a yeasty whiff of fermentation.
“Speaking of which,” I said, giving the opened sack of damp barley a poke with my toe, “this needs to be spread to dry, before it starts to mold, if it hasn’t already.”
Jamie was staring at the disgusting soup, brows furrowed in thought.
“Aye?” he said absently, then, coming to consciousness, “Oh, aye. I’ll do it.” He twisted shut the top of the bag, and heaved it onto his shoulder. On the way out the door, he paused, looking at the shrouded skull.
“You said ye didna think him Christian,” he said, and glanced curiously at me. “Why was that, Sassenach?”
I hesitated, but there was no time to tell him about my dream—if that’s what it had been. I could hear Duncan and Ian in conversation, coming toward the house.
“No particular reason,” I said, with a shrug.
“Aye, well,” he said. “We’ll give him the benefit o’ the doubt.”
24
LETTER-WRITING: THE GREAT ART O’ LOVE
Oxford, March 1971
Roger supposed that it must rain as much in Inverness as it did in Oxford, but somehow he had never minded the northern rain. The cold Scottish wind sweeping in off the Moray Firth was exhilarating and the drenching rain both stimulation and refreshment to the spirit.
But that had been Scotland, when Brianna was with him. Now she was in America, he in England, and Oxford was cold and dull, all its streets and buildings gray as the ash of dead fires. Rain pattered on the shoulders of his scholar’s gown as he dashed across the quad, shielding an armload of papers under the poplin folds. Once in the shelter of the porter’s lodge, he stopped to shake himself, doglike, flinging droplets over the stone passage.
“Any letters?” he asked.
“Think so, Mr. Wakefield. Just a sec.” Martin disappeared into his inner sanctum, leaving Roger to read the names of the College’s war dead, carved on the stone tablet inside the entry.