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He stayed thus for some time, thoughts drifting, staring at the flickering blue shapes on the wall. Became aware that he was still stroking the coverlet, slowly, but that the image in his mind was no longer that of a child’s hair. Soft, but coarser. Springy curls. Dark. And an imagined sense of warmth from the skin beneath.
“Jesus,” he said, and curled his hand into a fist. Rising, he crossed the room and jerked open the armoire. He groped, searching in the dimness for the pocket of his coat, felt no crackling of paper and gripped the cloth in sudden alarm, before catching sight of the letter, neatly set beside his hairbrushes on the shelf where Tom had placed it.
He took it up, heart beating faster, and tilted the paper. The lock of hair fell out into his hand. Dark, a single curl, tied with red thread.
I ca
He unfolded the letter and read the line again, for the pleasure of seeing the words upon the page. Gazed at them for several moments, then carefully folded the paper again, and set it back in place.
In all truth, the words caused him as much disturbance as pleasure. He had not expected thoughts of Percy to follow him to Helwater, and was not sure of his feelings. He hoped, to be sure, that they might discover something between them. But what that something might be, or come to be, he had no notion. If it happened at all, though, he envisioned it happening in London. London was a separate world, almost as though he were a different person there.
He did, on the other hand, know very well what his feelings were for Jamie Fraser. And being at Helwater, no more than a hundred yards from Fraser’s physical presence, was sufficiently disturbing in itself. He had the irrational feeling that to take such pleasure in Percy’s note was in some way a betrayal—but of what, for God’s sake?
Moved by impulse, he drew back the heavy blue-velvet drapes at the window. It was a cloudy night, a thick rain still falling, but the sky held a faint sullen glow, the diffuse light of a hidden moon. He could see the dim outline of the stable roof through the streaks of rain on the windowpane.
“Hell,” he said softly, left the window abruptly, and wandered round the room, picking up objects at random and putting them down again. He tried to return to his earlier thoughts—or to abandon all thought, purging the mind for sleep—but his efforts were bootless. James Fraser remained stubbornly in the center of his mind’s eye. Grey had seen him once since his arrival—he had taken Grey’s horse to the stables—but had had no opportunity to speak to him.
For God’s sake, John, be careful.
His mother’s words rang abruptly in his ear, and he shook his head, as though to dislodge an a
And what, for God’s sake, had his mother meant by that? Plainly, she meant Fraser; it was mention of the man and his Jacobite co
Something regarding his father’s death. Thosewords came cold, from the dark recesses of his own mind. He shoved them reflexively away. His father had been dead for nearly seventeen years. He thought now and then of his father, but never of his death. And didn’t mean to think of it now.
Such mortal thoughts, though, reminded him suddenly again of Geneva. Where was she tonight? Not in a spiritual sense—he trusted vaguely that she must be in heaven, though he had no concrete notion of the place—but in the physical?
The funeral would be tomorrow. Her body…He glanced uneasily at the black night outside his window, as though she might be floating there, pale face staring in at him, her chestnut hair pasted to her skull by the pouring rain.
He pulled the curtains firmly shut. She would be in her coffin, ready for the procession to the church in the morning. Was she somewhere in the house? Surely she did not lie in some hogg house or desolate shed on the grounds?
The chapel.Of course. The thought came to him at once. He had never been in the chapel at Helwater; it dated from a much earlier century, when the Viscounts of the Wastwater had been Catholic, and it had been disused for years. He knew where it was, though; Geneva herself had shown him, waving a careless hand toward the small stone chamber that clung barnaclelike to the west side of the house.
“That’s the old chapel,” she had said. “We have a ghost there, did you know?”
“Well, I should hope so,” he had replied, jesting. “All respectable families have at least one, do they not?”
She had looked at him queerly for a moment, but then laughed.
“Ours is a monk, a young man who kneels in prayer in the chapel at night. What kind of ghost has your family, then, Lord John?”
“Oh, we are not sufficiently respectable as to have an actual ghost of our own,” he assured her gravely. “Nothing but the odd skeleton in the closet.”
That had made her laugh immoderately—little did she know how true his remarks had been, he reflected, with a slight smile at the memory. The smile faded at the realization that he would not hear her laugh again.
He felt her absence suddenly and keenly. He had been so occupied with the grief of her family that he had felt her loss only as theirs, terrible, but experienced at a safe remove; now, in the deep solitude of the night, he understood it as his own. He stood for a moment, bereavement a sudden, small tear in his soul.
Unable to bear this for long, he reached with sudden decision for the armoire and found his cloak, threw it round his shoulders, pushed his feet into felt slippers, and went out into the corridor, easing the door softly to behind him. He would say farewell to her, at least, in private.
Discovering from within a room he had only seen from without was something of a challenge; Helwater, like most old houses, had been built in fits and starts as the finances and whimsy of successive viscounts allowed. Thus, it was a huge place—Lady Dunsany had told him that the entire east wing was closed in winter—and no passage went straightforwardly anywhere.
He had a good sense of direction, though, and knew that the chapel was at the northwest corner of the house. He worked his way through the twisting corridors as he would a maze, keeping a ru
The rain had kept up steadily all day, in that dismal winter downpour that darkens the spirit as it weights the land. The wind had come up now, and rain beat upon the shuttered windows in fitful bursts, marking his passage along the darkened corridors. He had brought a taper from his room, a faint glow to light his path. Something moved in the shadows and he stopped short.
Green eyes glowed for an instant and disappeared as the cat—it was only a cat—twined past his feet and vanished, silent as smoke. Was that Geneva’s cat? She had had a kitten once, he knew. Would she not have taken it to Ellesmere? Perhaps her mother had brought it back. Perhaps…perhaps he was trying to occupy his mind with pointless trifles in order to avoid thinking of Geneva dead, even as he made his way toward her bier.
Heart still beating like a drum, he wondered what he thought he was doing, but he had come thus far; to turn back now would seem an abandonment of her. He closed his eyes for an instant, reestablishing the map of the house he was building in his head, then opened them and set off again with purpose.
Several more turnings brought him abruptly to what seemed an outer wall of the house, its lichened blocks pierced by an arched lintel of honey-colored stone.
This was clearly the chapel’s entrance; the figures of saints and angels were carved into the arch. They had escaped the mutilations of Cromwell’s vandals in the last century—he made out the figure of what must be Michael the archangel in the center of the arch, flaming sword held aloft. Below him, Adam and Eve cowered behind crude fig leaves, Eve’s hands crossed modestly over her generous breasts. Not saints, after all. On the other side of the arch, a serpent hung in looping coils from the branches of an apple tree, looking smugly amused.