“It’s empty,” he said.
“Yes, sir. It should not be.” Ulysses’s voice was low and respectful, but firm.
“What was there?” I asked, glancing out of the pantry to be sure we were not overheard. The kitchen looked as though a bomb had gone off in it, but only a scullion was there, a half-witted boy who was washing pots, singing softly to himself.
“Part of an ingot of gold,” Ulysses replied softly.
The French gold Hector Cameron had brought away from Scotland, ten thousand pounds in bullion, cast in ingots and marked with the royal fleur-de-lis, was the foundation of River Run’s wealth. But it would not do, of course, for that fact to be known. First Hector, and then, after Hector’s death, Ulysses, had taken one of the gold bars and scraped bits of the soft yellow metal into a small, anonymous heap. This could then be taken to the river warehouses—or for additional safety, sometimes as far as the coastal towns of Edenton, Wilmington, or New Bern—and there carefully changed, in small amounts that would cause no comment, into cash or warehouse certificates, which could safely be used anywhere.
“There was about half of the ingot left,” Ulysses said, nodding toward the cavity in the wall. “I found it gone a few months ago. Since then, of course, I have contrived a new hiding place.”
Jamie looked into the empty cavity, then turned to Ulysses.
“The rest?”
“Safe enough, last time I checked, sir.” The bulk of the gold was concealed inside Hector Cameron’s mausoleum, hidden in a coffin and guarded, presumably, by his spirit. One or two of the slaves besides Ulysses might know about it, but the very lively fear of ghosts was enough to keep everyone away. I remembered the line of salt spread on the ground in front of the mausoleum, and shivered a little, in spite of the stifling heat in the basement.
“I could not, of course, make shift to look today,” the butler added.
“No, of course not. Duncan knows?” Jamie nodded toward the recess, and Ulysses nodded.
“The thief might have been anyone. So many people come to this house. . . .” The butler’s massive shoulders moved in a small shrug. “But now that this man from the sea has come again—it puts a different face upon the matter, does it not, sir?”
“Aye, it does.” Jamie contemplated the matter for a moment, tapping two fingers softly against his leg.
“Well, then. Ye’ll need to stay for a bit, Sassenach, will ye not? To look after my aunt’s eye?”
I nodded. Provided no infection resulted from my crude intervention, there was little or nothing I could do for the eye itself. But it should be watched, kept clean and irrigated, until I could be sure it was healed.
“We’ll stay, then, for a bit,” he said, turning to Ulysses. “I’ll send the Bugs back to the Ridge, to mind things and see to the haying. We’ll stay, and watch.”
THE HOUSE WAS FULL of guests, but I slept in Jocasta’s dressing room, so that I might keep an eye on her. The easing of pressure in her eye had relieved the excruciating pain, and she had fallen soundly asleep, her vital signs reassuring enough that I felt I could sleep, too.
Knowing I had a patient, though, I slept lightly, waking at intervals to tiptoe into her room. Duncan was sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed, dead to the world from the exhaustions of the day. I could hear his heavy breathing, as I lit a taper from the hearth and came to stand by the bed.
Jocasta was still soundly asleep, lying on her back, arms crossed gracefully over the coverlet and her head thrown back, sternly long-nosed and aristocratic as the tomb figures in the chapel of St. Denys. All she wanted was a crown, and a small dog of some kind crouched at her feet.
I smiled at the thought, thinking as I did how odd it was: Jamie slept in exactly that fashion, lying flat on his back, hands crossed, straight as an arrow. Brianna didn’t; she was a wild sleeper, and had been from a child. Like me.
The thought gave me a small, unexpected feeling of pleasure. I knew I had given her some parts of me, of course, but she resembled Jamie so strongly, it was always something of a surprise to notice one.
I blew out the taper, but didn’t at once return to bed. I had taken Phaedre’s cot in the dressing room, but it was a hot, airless little space. The hot day and the consumption of alcohol had left me cotton-mouthed, with a vague headache; I picked up the carafe from Jocasta’s bedside, but it was empty.
No need to relight the taper; one of the sconces in the hallway was still burning, and a dim glow outlined the door. I pushed it open quietly and looked out. The corridor was lined with bodies—servants sleeping by the doors of the bedrooms—and the air throbbed gently with the snoring and heavy breathing of a great many people sunk in slumber of varying degrees.
At the end of the corridor, though, one pale figure stood upright, looking out through the tall casement window toward the river.
She must have heard me, but didn’t turn around. I came to stand beside her, looking out. Phaedre was undressed to her shift, her hair free of its cloth and falling in a soft thick mass around her shoulders. Rare for a slave to have such hair, I thought; most women kept their hair very short under turban or headcloth, lacking both time and tools for dressing it. But Phaedre was a body servant; she would have some leisure—and a comb, at least.
“Would you like your bed back?” I asked, low-voiced. “I’ll be up for a while—and can sleep on the divan.”
She glanced at me, and shook her head.
“Oh, no, ma’am,” she said softly. “Thankee kindly; I ain’t sleepy.” She saw the carafe I carried, and reached for it. “I fetch you some water, ma’am?”
“No, no, I’ll do it. I’d like the air.” Still, I stood beside her, looking out.
It was a beautiful night, thick with stars that hung low and bright over the river, a faint silver thread that wound its way through the dark. There was a moon, a slender sickle, riding low on its way below the curve of the earth, and one or two small campfires burned in the trees beside the river.
The window was open, and bugs were swarming in; a small cloud of them danced around the candle in the sconce behind us, and tiny winged things brushed my face and arms. Crickets sang, so many of them that their song was a high, constant sound, like a bow drawn over violin strings.
Phaedre moved to shut it—to sleep with a window open was considered most unhealthy, and likely was, given the various mosquito-borne diseases in this swampish atmosphere.
“I thought I heard something. Out there,” she said, nodding toward the dark below.
“Oh? Probably my husband,” I said. “Or Ulysses.”
“Ulysses?” she said, looking startled.
Jamie, Ian, and Ulysses had organized a system of patrol, and were doubtless out somewhere in the night, gliding round the house and keeping an eye on Hector’s mausoleum, just in case. Knowing nothing of the disappearing gold nor Jocasta’s mysterious visitor, though, Phaedre wouldn’t be aware of the increased vigilance, save in the indirect way in which slaves always knew things—the instinct that had doubtless roused her to look out the window.
“They’re just keeping an eye out,” I said, as reassuringly as I could. “With so many people here, you know.” The MacDonalds had gone to Farquard Campbell’s plantation to spend the night, and a goodly number of guests had gone with them, but there were still a lot of people on the premises.
She nodded, but looked troubled.
“It just feel like something ain’t right,” she said. “Don’t know what ’tis.”
“Your mistress’s eye—” I began, but she shook her head.
“No. No. I don’t know, but there something in the air; I be feelin’ it. Not just tonight, I don’t mean—something goin’ on. Something coming.” She looked at me, helpless to express what she meant, but her mood communicated itself to me.
It might be in part simply the heightened emotions of the oncoming conflict. One could in fact feel that in the air. But there might be something else, too—something subterranean, barely sensed, but there, like the dim form of a sea serpent, glimpsed for only a moment, then gone, and so put down to legend.
“My grannie, she taken from Africa,” Phaedre said softly, staring out at the night. “She talk to the bones. Say they tell her when bad things comin’.”
“Really?” In such an atmosphere, quiet save the night sounds, so many souls adrift around us, there seemed nothing unreal about such a statement. “Did she teach you to . . . talk to bones?”
She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth tucked in, a small, secret expression, and I thought she might know more about it than she was willing to say.
One unwelcome thought had occurred to me. I didn’t see how Stephen Bonnet could be connected to present events—surely he was not the man who had spoken to Jocasta out of her past, and just as surely, stealthy theft was not his style. But he did have some reason to believe there might be gold somewhere at River Run—and from what Roger had told us of Phaedre’s encounter with the big Irishman in Cross Creek . . .
“The Irishman you met, when you were out with Jemmy,” I said, changing my grip on the slick surface of the carafe, “have you ever seen him again?”
She looked surprised at that; clearly Bonnet was the farthest thing from her mind.
“No, ma’am,” she said. “Ain’t seen him again, ever.” She thought for a moment, big eyes hooded. She was the color of strong coffee with a dash of cream, and her hair—there had been a white man in her family tree at some time, I thought.
“No, ma’am,” she repeated softly, and turned her troubled gaze back to the quiet night and the sinking moon. “All I know—something ain’t right.”
Out by the stables, a rooster began to crow, the sound out of place and eerie in the dark.
55
WENDIGO
August 20, 1774
THE LIGHT IN THE MORNING room was perfect.
“We began with this room,” Jocasta had told her great-niece, raising her face to the sun that poured through the open double doors to the terrace, lids closed over her blind eyes. “I wanted a room to paint in, and chose this spot, where the light would come in, bright as crystal in the morning, like still water in the afternoon. And then we built the house around it.” The old woman’s hands, still long-fingered and strong, touched the easel, the pigment pots, the brushes, with affectionate regret, as she might caress the statue of a long-dead lover—a passion recalled, but accepted as forever gone.
And Brianna, sketching block and pencil in hand, had drawn as quickly, as covertly as she could, to catch that fleeting expression of grief outlived.
That sketch lay with the others in the bottom of her box, against the day when she might try it in more finished form, try to catch that merciless light, and the deep-carved lines of her aunt’s face, strong bones stark in the sun she could not see.
For now, though, the painting at hand was a matter of business, rather than love or art. Nothing suspicious had happened since Flora MacDonald’s barbecue, but her parents meant to stay for a little longer, just in case. With Roger still in Charlotte—he had written to her; the letter was secreted in the bottom of her box, with the private sketches—there was no reason why she shouldn’t stay, too. Hearing of her continued presence, two or three of Jocasta’s acquaintances, wealthy planters, had commissioned portraits of themselves or their families; a welcome source of income.