Dragonfly in Amber 2(388)
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.”
“Fiona?” This, Roger felt, was simply too much. The crowning absurdity. Anything else he could manage to believe—time passages, clan treachery, historical revelations—but bringing Fiona into it was more than his reason could be expected to stand. He looked pleadingly at Claire. “Tell me you don’t mean that,” he begged. “Not Fiona.”
Claire’s mouth twitched at one corner. “I’m afraid so,” she said, not without sympathy. “I asked her—about the Druid group that her grandmother belonged to, you know. She’s been sworn to secrecy, of course, but I knew quite a bit about them already, and well…” She shrugged, mildly apologetic. “It wasn’t too difficult to get her to talk. She told me that there’d been another woman asking questions—a tall, fair-haired woman, with very striking green eyes. Fiona said the woman reminded her of someone,” she added delicately, carefully not looking at him, “but she couldn’t think who.”