Dragonfly In Amber - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги бесплатно полностью без регистрации сокращений txt) 📗

Claire thanked him, sipped from the glass, then set it down and looked up at him, tired but composed.

“You’ll likely be wondering why I wanted you to hear the whole story,” she said, with that unnerving ability to see into his thoughts.

“There were two reasons. I’ll tell you the second presently, but as for the first, I thought you had some right to hear it.”

“Me? What right?”

The golden eyes were direct, unsettling as a leopard’s guileless stare. “The same as Brianna. The right to know who you are.” She moved across the room to the far wall. It was cork-lined from floor to ceiling, encrusted with layers of photographs, charts, notes, stray visiting cards, old parish schedules, spare keys, and other bits of rubbish pinned to the cork.

“I remember this wall.” Claire smiled, touching a picture of Prize Day at the local grammar school. “Did your father ever take anything off it?”

Roger shook his head, bewildered. “No, I don’t believe he did. He always said he could never find things put away in drawers; if it was anything important, he wanted it in plain sight.”

“Then it’s likely still here. He thought it was important.”

Reaching up, she began to thumb lightly through the overlapping layers, gently separating the yellowed papers.

“This one, I think,” she murmured, after some riffling back and forth. Reaching far up under the detritus of sermon notes and car-wash tickets, she detached a single sheet of paper and laid it on the desk.

“Why, it’s my family tree,” Roger said in surprise. “I haven’t seen that old thing in years. And never paid any attention to it when I did see it, either,” he added. “If you’re going to tell me I’m adopted, I already know that.”

Claire nodded, intent on the chart. “Oh, yes. That’s why your father – Mr. Wakefield, I mean – drew up this chart. He wanted to be sure that you would know your real family, even though he gave you his own name.”

Roger sighed, thinking of the Reverend, and the small silver-framed picture on his bureau, with the smiling likeness of an unknown young man, darkhaired in World War II RAF uniform.

“Yes, I know that, too. My family name was MacKenzie. Are you going to tell me I’m connected to some of the MacKenzies you… er, knew? I don’t see any of those names on this chart.”

Claire acted as though she hadn’t heard him, tracing a finger down the spidery hand-drawn lines of the genealogy.

“Mr. Wakefield was a terrible stickler for accuracy,” she murmured, as though to herself. “He wouldn’t want any mistakes.” Her finger came to a halt on the page.

“Here,” she said. “This is where it happened. Below this point” – her finger swept down the page – “everything is right. These were your parents, and your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and so on. But not above.” The finger swept upward.

Roger bent over the chart, then looked up, moss-green eyes thoughtful.

“This one? William Buccleigh MacKenzie, born 1744, of William John MacKenzie and Sarah Innes. Died 1782.”

Claire shook her head. “Died 1744, aged two months, of smallpox.” She looked up, and the golden eyes met his with a force that sent a shiver down his spine. “Yours wasn’t the first adoption in that family, you know,” she said. Her finger tapped the entry. “He needed a wet nurse,” she said. “His own mother was dead – so he was given to a family that had lost a baby. They called him by the name of the child they had lost – that was common – and I don’t suppose anyone wanted to call attention to his ancestry by recording the new child in the parish register. He would have been baptized at birth, after all; it wasn’t necessary to do it again. Colum told me where they placed him.”

“Geillis Duncan’s son,” he said slowly. “The witch’s child.”

“That’s right.” She gazed at him appraisingly, head cocked to one side. “I knew it must be, when I saw you. The eyes, you know. They’re hers.”

Roger sat down, feeling suddenly quite cold, in spite of the bookshelf blocking the draft, and the newly kindled fire on the hearth.

“You’re sure of this?” he said, but of course she was sure. Assuming that the whole story was not a fabrication, the elaborate construction of a diseased mind. He glanced up at her, sitting unruffled with her whisky, composed as though about to order cheese straws.

Diseased mind? Dr. Claire Beauchamp-Randall, chief of staff at a large, important hospital? Raving insanity, rampant delusions? Easier to believe himself insane. In fact, he was beginning to believe just that.

He took a deep breath and placed both hands flat on the chart, blotting out the entry for William Buccleigh MacKenzie.

“Well, it’s interesting all right, and I suppose I’m glad you told me. But it doesn’t really change anything, does it? Except that I suppose I can tear off the top half of this genealogy and throw it away. After all, we don’t know where Geillis Duncan came from, nor the man who fathered her child; you seem sure it wasn’t poor old Arthur.”

Claire shook her head, a distant look in her eyes.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t Arthur Duncan. It was Dougal MacKenzie who fathered Geilie’s child. That was the real reason she was killed. Not witchcraft. But Colum MacKenzie couldn’t let it be known that his brother had had an adulterous affair with the fiscal’s wife. And she wanted to marry Dougal; I think perhaps she threatened the MacKenzies with the truth about Hamish.”

“Hamish? Oh, Colum’s son. Yes, I remember.” Roger rubbed his forehead. His head was starting to spin.

“Not Colum’s son,” Claire corrected. “Dougal’s. Colum couldn’t sire children, but Dougal could – and did. Hamish was the heir to the chieftainship of clan MacKenzie; Colum would have killed anyone who threatened Hamish – and did.”

She drew a deep breath. “And that,” she said, “leads to the second reason why I told you the story.”

Roger buried both hands in his hair, staring down at the table, where the lines of the genealogical chart seemed to writhe like mocking snakes, forked tongues flickering between the names.

“Geillis Duncan,” he said hoarsely. “She had a vaccination scar.”

“Yes. It was that, finally, that made me come back to Scotland. When I left with Frank, I swore I would never come back. I knew I could never forget, but I could bury what I knew; I could stay away, and never seek to know what happened after I left. It seemed the least I could do, for both of them, for Frank and Jamie. And for the baby coming.” Her lips pressed tightly together for a moment.

“But Geilie saved my life, at the trial in Cranesmuir. Perhaps she was doomed herself in any case; I think she believed so. But she threw away any chance she might have had, in order to save me. And she left me a message. Dougal gave it to me, in a cave in the Highlands, when he brought me the news that Jamie was in prison. There were two pieces to the message. A sentence, ‘I do not know if it is possible, but I think so,’ and a sequence of four numbers – one, nine, six, and eight.”

“Nineteen sixty-eight,” Roger said, with the feeling that this was a dream. Surely he would be waking soon. “This year. What did she mean, she thought it was possible?”

“To go back. Through the stones. She hadn’t tried, but she thought I could. And she was right, of course.” Claire turned and picked up her whisky from the table. She stared at Roger across the rim of the glass, eyes the same color as the contents. “This is 1968; the year she went back herself. Except that I think she hasn’t yet gone.”

The glass slipped in Roger’s hand, and he barely caught it in time.

“What… here? But she… why not… you can’t tell…” He was sputtering, thoughts jarred into incoherency.

“I don’t know,” Claire pointed out. “But I think so. I’m fairly sure she was Scots, and the odds are good that she came through somewhere in the Highlands. Granted that there are any number of standing stones, we know that Craigh na Dun is a passage – for those that can use it. Besides,” she added, with the air of one presenting the final argument, “Fiona’s seen her.”