McEwan made a very small noise in his throat.
Then Buck and Geillis were gone, the sound of their footsteps and animated voices dying away as they climbed the stairs to the attic, leaving Roger and McEwan both silent, each for his own reasons.
ROGER THOUGHT that the good doctor might be about to suffer an apoplexy, if that was the correct medical term for “blow a gasket.” Whatever his own feelings about the abrupt departure of Buck and Geillis—and those were vivid—they paled beside the hue of Hector McEwan’s face.
The doctor was panting slightly, his complexion puce. Plainly he wanted to follow the errant pair but just as clearly was constrained by the fact that he had no idea what he might conceivably do when he caught up with them.
“It’s not what you think,” Roger said, commending his soul to God and hoping that it wasn’t.
McEwan swung round to glare at him. “The devil it’s not,” he snapped. “You don’t know her.”
“Plainly not as well as you do, no,” Roger said pointedly, and raised one brow.
McEwan said something blasphemous in reply, took up the poker, and stabbed viciously at the smoking bricks of peat in the hearth. He half-turned toward the door, the poker still in his hand, and the look on his face was such that Roger leapt to his feet and grabbed him by the arm.
“Stop, man,” he said, keeping his voice pitched as low and evenly as he could, in hopes of soothing McEwan. “Ye’ll do yourself no good. Sit down, now. I’ll tell ye why it—why he—why the man’s interested in her.”
“For the same reason every dog in the village is interested in a bitch in heat,” McEwan said venomously. But he let Roger take the poker from his hand, and while he wouldn’t sit down, he did at least take several deep breaths that restored a semblance of calm.
“Aye, tell me, then—for all the good it will do,” he said.
It wasn’t a situation that allowed for diplomacy or euphemism.
“She’s his mother, and he knows it,” Roger said bluntly.
Whatever McEwan had been expecting, that wasn’t it, and for an instant, Roger was gratified to see the man’s face go absolutely blank with shock. Only for an instant, though. It was likely going to be a tricky bit of pastoral counseling, at best.
“Ye know what he is,” Roger said, taking the doctor by the arm again and pulling him toward a brocaded wing chair. “Or, rather, what we are. Cognosco te?”
“I—” McEwan’s voice died, though he opened and closed his mouth a few times, helplessly looking for words.
“Aye, I know,” Roger said soothingly. “It’s difficult. But ye do know, don’t ye?”
“I—yes.” McEwan sat down abruptly. He breathed for a moment, blinked once or twice, and looked up at Roger.
“His mother. His mother?”
“I have it on good authority,” Roger assured him. A thought struck him, though.
“Ah . . . ye did know about her, didn’t ye? That she’s . . . one of us?”
McEwan nodded. “She’s never admitted it. Just—just laughed at me when I told her where I’d come from. And I didn’t know for a long time. Not until I—” His lips clamped abruptly into a tight line.
“I’m guessing ye didn’t have occasion to heal her of anything,” Roger said carefully. “Does she . . . er . . . has it got anything to do with blue light, by chance?”
He was trying hard to avoid the mental picture of Geillis and Dr. McEwan, naked and sweating, both bathed in a faint blue glow. The woman was his several-times great-grandmother, whatever else you liked to say about her.
McEwan gave him a bleak look and shook his head.
“Not . . . exactly. She’s a very fine herbalist and not bad at diagnosis, but she can’t—do that.” He twiddled his fingers briefly in illustration, and Roger felt a faint memory of the warmth when McEwan had touched his throat.
The doctor sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.
“No point in evasion, I suppose. I got her with child. And I could—‘see’ is not quite the right word, but I can’t think of a better one. I could see the moment when my . . . seed . . . reached her ovum. The . . . er . . . the fetus. It glowed inside her womb; I could sense it when I touched her.”
A certain heat rose in Roger’s face. “Forgive me for asking, but—how do you know that happened because she’s . . . what she is? Might it not be the case with a normal woman?”
McEwan smiled—very bleakly—at the word “normal,” and shook his head.
“I had two children by a woman in Edinburgh, in—in my own time,” he said quietly, and looked down at his feet. “That . . . was one of the reasons I didn’t try to return.”
Roger made a sound in his damaged throat that was meant to be regretful and compassionate, but whether his feelings or his larynx had got the better of him, it emerged as a rather stern “Hrmph!” and McEwan’s color began to rise again.
“I know,” he said wretchedly. “I don’t seek to—to excuse it.”
Just as well, Roger thought. I’d like to see ye try, you—you— But recriminations would do no one any good just now, and he stifled whatever else he might have said on the subject, instead returning to Geillis.
“Ye said ye got her”—jerking his chin upward, to where the sounds of footsteps and bumpings were audible overhead—“with child. Where is the child?”
McEwan drew a long, trembling breath. “I said . . . she is a very fine herb-alist . . . ?”