“You know what?” she said. “I’ll bet that isn’t going to make it on the list of popular theories.”
Roger laughed, catching a crab, and droplets of water sprayed over Brianna. She snorted, sat up abruptly, blinking, then sank back down, face flushed with sleep, and was breathing heavily within seconds.
“She was up late last night, helping me box up the last set of records to go back to the University of Leeds,” Roger said, defensive on her behalf.
Claire nodded abstractedly, watching her daughter.
“Jamie could do that,” she said softly. “Lie down and sleep anywhere.”
She fell silent. Roger rowed steadily on, toward the point of the loch where the grim bulk of the ruins of Castle Urquhart stood amid its pines.
“The thing is,” Claire said at last, “it gets harder. Going through the first time was the most terrible thing I’d ever had happen to me. Coming back was a thousand times worse.” Her eyes were fixed on the looming castle.
“I don’t know whether it was because I didn’t come back on the right day—it was Beltane when I went, and two weeks before, when I came back.”
“Geilie—Gillian, I mean—she went on Beltane, too.” In spite of the heat of the day, Roger felt slightly cold, seeing again the figure of the woman who had been both his ancestor and his contemporary, standing in the light of a blazing bonfire, fixed for a moment in the light, before disappearing forever into the cleft of the standing stones.
“That’s what her notebook said—that the door is open on the Sun Feasts and the Fire Feasts. Perhaps it’s only partly open as you near those times. Or perhaps she was wrong altogether; after all, she thought you had to have a human sacrifice to make it work.”
Claire swallowed heavily. The petrol-soaked remains of Greg Edgars, Gillian’s husband, had been recovered from the stone circle by the police, on May Day. The record concluded of his wife only, “Fled, whereabouts unknown.”
Claire leaned over the side, trailing a hand in the water. A small cloud drifted over the sun, turning the loch a sudden gray, with dozens of small waves rising on the surface as the light wind increased. Directly below, in the wake of the boat, the water was darkly impenetrable. Seven hundred feet deep is Loch Ness, and bitter cold. What can live in a place like that?
“Would you go down there, Roger?” she asked softly. “Jump overboard, dive in, go on down through that dark until your lungs were bursting, not knowing whether there are things with teeth and great heavy bodies waiting?”
Roger felt the hair on his arms rise, and not only because the sudden wind was chilly.
“But that’s not all the question,” she continued, still staring into the blank, mysterious water. “Would you go, if Brianna were down there?” She straightened up and turned to face him.
“Would you go?” The amber eyes were intent on his, unblinking as a hawk’s.
He licked his lips, chapped and dried by the wind, and cast a quick look over his shoulder at Brianna, sleeping. He turned back to face Claire.
“Yes. I think I would.”
She looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded, unsmiling.
“So would I.”
PART FIVE
You Can’t Go Home Again
18
ROOTS
September 1968
The woman next to me probably weighed three hundred pounds. She wheezed in her sleep, lungs laboring to lift the burden of her massive bosom for the two-hundred-thousandth time. Her hip and thigh and pudgy arm pressed against mine, unpleasantly warm and damp.
There was no escape; I was pinned on the other side by the steel curve of the plane’s fuselage. I eased one arm upward and flicked on the overhead light in order to see my watch. Ten-thirty, by London time; at least another six hours before the landing in New York promised escape.
The plane was filled with the collective sighs and snorts of passengers dozing as best they might. Sleep for me was out of the question. With a sigh of resignation, I dug into the pocket in front of me for the half-finished romance novel I had stashed there. The tale was by one of my favorite authors, but I found my attention slipping from the book—either back to Roger and Brianna, whom I had left in Edinburgh, there to continue the hunt, or forward, to what awaited me in Boston.
I wasn’t sure just what did await me, which was part of the problem. I had been obliged to come back, if only temporarily; I had long since exhausted my vacation, plus several extensions. There were matters to be dealt with at the hospital, bills to be collected and paid at home, the maintenance of the house and yard to be attended to—I shuddered to think what heights the lawn in the backyard must have attained by now—friends to be called on…
One friend in particular. Joseph Abernathy had been my closest friend, from medical school on. Before I made any final—and likely irrevocable—decisions, I wanted to talk to him. I closed the book in my lap and sat tracing the extravagant loops of the title with one finger, smiling a little. Among other things, I owed a taste for romance novels to Joe.
* * *
I had known Joe since the beginning of my medical training. He stood out among the other interns at Boston General, just as I did. I was the only woman among the budding doctors; Joe was the only black intern.
Our shared singularity gave us each a special awareness for the other; both of us sensed it clearly, though neither mentioned it. We worked together very well, but both of us were wary—for good reason—of exposing ourselves, and the tenuous bond between us, much too nebulous to be called friendship, remained unacknowledged until near the end of our internship.
I had done my first unassisted surgery that day—an uncomplicated appendectomy, done on a teenaged boy in good health. It had gone well, and there was no reason to think there would be postoperative complications. Still, I felt an odd kind of possessiveness about the boy, and didn’t want to go home until he was awake and out of Recovery, even though my shift had ended. I changed clothes and went to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor to wait.
The lounge wasn’t empty. Joseph Abernathy sat in one of the rump-sprung stuffed chairs, apparently absorbed in a copy of U.S. News & World Report. He looked up as I entered, and nodded briefly to me before returning to his reading.
The lounge was equipped with stacks of magazines—salvaged from the waiting rooms—and a number of tattered paperbacks, abandoned by departing patients. Seeking distraction, I thumbed past a six-month-old copy of Studies in Gastroenterology, a ragged copy of Time magazine, and a neat stack of Watchtower tracts. Finally picking up one of the books, I sat down with it.
It had no cover, but the title page read The Impetuous Pirate. “A sensuous, compelling love story, boundless as the Spanish Main!” said the line beneath the title. The Spanish Main, eh? If escape was what I wanted, I couldn’t do much better, I thought, and opened the book at random. It fell open automatically to page 42.
Tipping up her nose scornfully, Tessa tossed her lush blond tresses back, oblivious to the fact that this caused her voluptuous breasts to become even more prominent in the low-necked dress. Valdez’s eyes widened at the sight, but he gave no outward sign of the effect such wanton beauty had on him.
“I thought that we might become better acquainted, Se?orita,” he suggested, in a low, sultry voice that made little shivers of anticipation run up and down Tessa’s back.