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“Well, no—‘pisky’ is Cornish; they’re called pixies in other parts of the West Country, though.”
“What are they called in Scotland?”
“We haven’t really got any. Scotland’s got its fair share of the fairy folk,” he said, scooping up a handful of clock i
“Sure—if the piskies didn’t lose any of the parts. What on earth is a Nuckelavee?”
“It’s from the Orkneys. Nothing ye want to hear about just before bed,” he assured her. And, bending, breathed very softly on her neck, just below the earlobe.
The faint tingle engendered by the memory of what had happened after that momentarily overlaid her suspicions of what the children might be up to, but the sensation faded, to be replaced by increasing worry.
There was no sign of either Jem or Mandy anywhere in the house. A
Sure enough, the packet of chocolate biscuits was missing, as was a bottle of lemon squash, though everything else in the cupboard was in perfect order—and the cupboard was six feet off the ground. Jem showed great promise as a cat burglar, she thought. At least he’d have a career if he got chucked out of school for good one of these days after telling his classmates something especially picturesque he’d picked up in the eighteenth century.
The missing food allayed her uneasiness. If they’d taken a picnic, they were outside, and while they might be anywhere within a half mile of the house—Mandy wouldn’t walk farther than that—chances were they wouldn’t have gone far before sitting down to eat biscuits.
It was a beautiful fall day, and despite the need to track down her miscreants, she was glad to be out in the sun and breeze. Socks could wait. And so could turning the vegetable beds. And speaking to the plumber about the geyser in the upstairs bath. And …
“It doesna matter how many things ye do on a farm, there’s always more than ye can do. A wonder the place doesna rise up about my ears and swallow me, like Jonah and the whale.”
For an instant, she heard her father’s voice, full of exasperated resignation at encountering another unexpected chore. She glanced round at him, smiling, then stopped, realization and longing sweeping over her in waves.
“Oh, Da,” she said softly. She walked on, more slowly, suddenly seeing not the albatross of a big, semi-decayed house, but the living organism that was Lallybroch, and all those of her blood who had been part of it—who still were.
The Frasers and Murrays who had put their own sweat and blood and tears into its buildings and soil, woven their lives into its land. Uncle Ian, Aunt Je
“Not gone at all,” she said aloud, and found comfort in the words. She’d reached the back gate of the kailyard and paused, glancing up the hill toward the ancient broch that gave the place its name; the burying ground was up on that same hill, most of its stones so weathered that the names and their dates were indecipherable, the stones themselves mostly obliterated by creeping gorse and sweet broom. And amidst the splashes of gray, black-green, and brilliant yellow were two small moving splotches of red and blue.
The pathway was badly overgrown; brambles ripped at her jeans. She found the children on hands and knees, following a trail of ants—who were in turn following a trail of cookie crumbs, carefully placed so as to lead the ants through an obstacle course of sticks and pebbles.
“Look, Mama!” Jem barely glanced up at her, absorbed in the sight before him. He pointed at the ground, where he had sunk an old teacup into the dirt and filled it with water. A black glob of ants, lured to their doom by chocolate crumbs, were struggling in the midst of it.
“Jem! That’s mean! You mustn’t drown ants—unless they’re in the house,” she added, with vivid memories of a recent infestation in the pantry.
“They’re not drowning, Mama. Look—see what they do?”
She crouched beside him, looking closer, and saw that, in fact, the ants weren’t drowning. Single ants that had fallen in struggled madly toward the center, where a large mass of ants clung together, making a ball that floated, barely denting the surface. The ants in the ball were moving, slowly, so that they changed places constantly, and while one or two near the edge of the mass were motionless, possibly dead, the majority were clearly in no immediate danger of drowning, supported by the bodies of their fellows. And the mass itself was gradually drawing closer to the rim of the cup, propelled by the movements of the ants in it.
“That’s really cool,” she said, fascinated, and sat beside him for some time, watching the ants, before finally decreeing mercy and making him scoop the ball of ants out on a leaf, where once laid on the ground, they scattered and at once went back to their business.
“Do you think they do it on purpose?” she asked Jem. “Cluster together like that, I mean. Or are they just looking for anything to hang on to?”
“Di
She gathered up the remnants of the picnic, leaving one or two biscuit fragments for the ants, who had, she felt, earned them. Mandy had wandered off while she and Jem watched the ants in the teacup, and was presently squatting in the shade of a bush some way uphill, engaged in animated conversation with an invisible companion.
“Mandy wanted to talk to Grandda,” Jem said matter-of-factly. “That’s why we came up here.”
“Oh?” she said slowly. “Why is here a good place to talk to him?”
Jem looked surprised, and glanced toward the weathered, tipsy stones of the burying ground.
“Isn’t he here?”
Something much too powerful to be called a shiver shot up her spine. It was as much Jem’s matter-of-factness as the possibility that it might be true that took her breath away.
“I—don’t know,” she said. “I suppose he could be.” While she tried not to think too much about the fact that her parents were now dead, she had somehow vaguely assumed that they would have been buried in North Carolina—or somewhere else in the Colonies, if war had taken them away from the Ridge.
But she remembered the letters suddenly. He’d said he meant to come back to Scotland. And Jamie Fraser being a determined man, more than likely he’d done just that. Had he never left again? And if he hadn’t—was her mother here, too?
Without really meaning to, she found herself making her way upward, past the foot of the old broch and through the stones of the burying ground. She’d come up here once, with her aunt Je
She was standing among the stones now; so many of them. A good many of the later ones were still readable, these with dates in the late 1800s. Murrays and McLachlan’s and McLean’s, for the most part. Here and there the odd Fraser or MacKenzie.