I thought of the cabin Jamie and Roger had found, a burnt shell, with the owners hanged from a tree before the house—and a young girl alive in the ashes, so badly burnt that she couldn’t live. We never discovered who had done it.
Jamie could see the thoughts cross my face. I might as well have a neon sign on my forehead, I thought crossly, and evidently he saw that one, too, for he smiled.
“There’s no law now, Sassenach,” he said. “Not wi’ the government gone.” There was neither fear nor passion in that statement—it was merely the truth of the matter.
“There never has been, up here. None but you, I mean.” That made him laugh, but I was just as right as he was.
“I didna come to rescue you alone, aye? That night?”
“No,” I said slowly. “You didn’t.” All the able-bodied men on the Ridge had answered his call for help and come out to follow him. Very much as his clansmen would have followed him to war, had we been in Scotland.
“So,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Those are the men you mean to … er … gang oot with?”
He nodded, looking thoughtful.
“Some of them,” he said slowly, and then glanced at me. “It’s different now, a nighean. There are men who were with me that night who willna follow me now, because they’re King’s men—Tories and Loyalists. The men who’ve kent me longest dinna mind so much that I was a rebel general—but there are a good many new tenants who dinna ken me at all.”
“I’m not sure that ‘Rebel General’ is a title you can lose,” I said.
“No,” he said, and smiled, though not with much humor. “Not without turning my coat. Aye, well.” He got to his feet and reached down a hand to pull me up in a rustle of leaves. “I’ve been a traitor for a long time, Sassenach, but I’d rather not be a traitor to both sides at once. If I can help it.”
Shouts and barking rang out from the trail above; the children had reached Ian’s house. We hurried after them and said no more of gangs, treason, or fat men in the dark.
20
I Bet You Think This Song Is about You …
NO ONE WENT TO the Old Garden, as the family called it. The people on the Ridge called it the Witch-child’s Garden, though not often in my hearing. I wasn’t sure whether “witch-child” was meant to refer to Malva Christie herself or to her baby boy. Both of them had died in the garden, in the midst of blood—and in my company. She had been no more than nineteen.
I never said the name aloud, but to me, it was Malva’s Garden.
For a time, I hadn’t been able to go up to it without a sense of waste and terrible sorrow, but I did go there now and then. To remember. To pray, sometimes. And frankly, if some of the more hidebound Presbyterians of the Ridge had seen me on some of these occasions, talking aloud to the dead or to God, they would have been quite sure they had the right name, but the wrong witch.
But the woods had their own slow magic and the garden was returning to them, healing under grass and moss, blood turning to the crimson bloom of bee balm, and its sorrow fading into peace.
Despite the creeping transformation, though, some remnants of the garden remained, and small treasures sprang up unexpectedly: there was a stubbornly thriving patch of onions in one corner, a thick growth of comfrey and sorrel fighting back against the grass, and—to my intense delight—several thriving peanut bushes, sprung up from long-buried seeds.
I’d found them two weeks before, the leaves just beginning to yellow, and dug them up. Hung them in the surgery to dry, plucked the dry peanuts from the tangle of dirt and rootlets, and roasted them in the shell, filling the house with memories of circuses and baseball games.
And tonight, I thought, tipping the cooled nuts into my tin shelling basin, we’d have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper.
THERE WAS A breeze on the porch, and I was grateful for it on my face after the heat of sun and hearth. Also a little welcome solitude: Bree had gone with Roger to call upon the tenants I still thought of as the fisher-folk—emigrants from Thurso, a dour lot of rock-ribbed Presbyterians who were deeply suspicious of Jamie as a Catholic, and much more of me. I was not only a Catholic but a conjure-woman, and the combination unsettled them to no little degree. They did like Roger, though, in a grudging sort of way, and the liking seemed reciprocal. He understood them, he said.
The children had done their chores and were scattered to the four winds; I heard their voices now and then, giggling and shrieking in the woods behind the house, but God only knew what they were doing. I was just pleased that they weren’t doing it right in front of me.