Dragonfly in Amber 2(389)

Roger merely groaned, and bending at the waist, collapsed slowly forward until his forehead rested on the table. He closed his eyes, feeling the cool hardness of the wood under his head.

“Did Fiona know who she was?” he asked, eyes still closed.

“Her name is Gillian Edgars,” Claire replied. He heard her rising, crossing the room, adding another tot of whisky to her glass. She came back and stood by the table. He could feel her gaze on the back of his neck.

“I’ll leave it to you.” Claire said quietly. “It’s your right to say. Shall I look for her?”

Roger lifted his head off the table and blinked at her incredulously. “Shall you look for her?” he said. “If this—if it’s all true—then we have to find her, don’t we? If she’s going back to be burned alive? Of course you have to find her!” he burst out. “How could you consider anything else?”

“And if I do find her?” she replied. She placed a slender hand on the grubby chart and raised her eyes to his. “What happens to you?” she asked softly.



* * *



He looked around helplessly, at the bright, cluttered study, with the wall of miscellanea, the chipped old teapot on the ancient oak table. Solid as…He gripped his thighs, clutching the rough corduroy as though for reassurance that he was as solid as the chair on which he sat.

“But…I’m real!” he burst out. “I can’t just…evaporate!”

Claire raised her brows consideringly. “I don’t know that you would. I have no idea what would happen. Perhaps you would never have existed? In which case, you oughtn’t to be too agitated now. Perhaps the part of you that makes you unique, your soul or whatever you want to call it—perhaps that’s fated to exist in any case, and you would still be you, though born of a slightly different lineage. After all, how much of your physical makeup can be due to ancestors six generations back? Half? Ten percent?” She shrugged, and pursed her lips, looking him over carefully.

“Your eyes come from Geilie, as I told you. But I see Dougal in you, too. No specific feature, though you have the MacKenzie cheekbones; Bree has them, too. No, it’s something more subtle, something in the way you move; a grace, a suddenness—no…” She shook her head. “I can’t describe it. But it’s there. Is it something you need, to be who you are? Could you do without that bit from Dougal?”

She rose heavily, looking her age for the first time since he had met her.

“I’ve spent more than twenty years looking for answers, Roger, and I can tell you only one thing: There aren’t any answers, only choices. I’ve made a number of them myself, and no one can tell me whether they were right or wrong. Master Raymond perhaps, though I don’t suppose he would; he was a man who believed in mysteries.

“I can see the right of it only far enough to know that I must tell you—and leave the choice to you.”

He picked up the glass and drained the rest of the whisky.

The Year of our Lord 1968. The year when Geillis Duncan stepped into the circle of standing stones. The year she went to meet her fate beneath the rowan trees in the hills near Leoch. An illegitimate child—and death by fire.

He rose and wandered up and down the rows of books that lined the study. Books filled with history, that mocking and mutable subject.

No answers, only choices.

Restless, he fingered the books on the top shelf. These were the histories of the Jacobite movement, the stories of the Rebellions, the ’15 and the ’45. Claire had known a number of the men and women described in these books. Had fought and suffered with them, to save a people strange to her. Had lost all she held dear in the effort. And in the end, had failed. But the choice had been hers, as now it was his.

Was there a chance that this was a dream, a delusion of some kind? He stole a glance at Claire. She lay back in her chair, eyes closed, motionless but for the beating of her pulse, barely visible in the hollow of her throat. No. He could, for a moment, convince himself that it was make-believe, but only while he looked away from her. However much he wanted to believe otherwise, he could not look at her and doubt a word of what she said.

He spread his hands flat on the table, then turned them over, seeing the maze of lines that crossed his palms. Was it only his own fate that lay here in his cupped hands, or did he hold an unknown woman’s life as well?

No answers. He closed his hands gently, as though holding something small trapped inside his fists, and made his choice.

“Let’s find her,” he said.

There was no sound from the still figure in the wing chair, and no movement save the rise and fall of the rounded breast. Claire was asleep.