A monstrous pokeweed rose from the center of the patch, nearly ten feet high, its thick red stem supporting a wealth of long green leaves and hundreds of purplish-red flower stalks. The nearby trees had grown immensely, shading the plot, and in the diffuse green light the long, nubbly stalks looked like nudibranchs, those colorful sea slugs, gently swaying in currents of air rather than water. I touched it respectfully in passing; it had an odd medicinal smell, well deserved. There were a number of useful things one could do with pokeweed, but eating it wasn’t one of them. Which was to say, people did eat the leaves on occasion, but the chances of accidental poisoning made it not worth the trouble of preparation unless there was absolutely nothing else to eat.
I couldn’t remember the exact spot where she’d died. Where the pokeweed grew? That would be entirely apropos, but maybe too poetic.
Malva Christie. A strange, damaged young woman—but one I’d loved. Who perhaps had loved me, as well as she could. She’d been with child and near her time when her brother—the child’s father—had cut her throat, here in the garden.
I’d found her moments later and tried to save the child, performing an emergency cesarean with my gardening knife. He’d been alive when I pulled him from his mother’s womb but died at once, the brief flame of his life a passing blue glow in my hands.
Did anyone name him? I wondered suddenly. They’d buried the baby boy with Malva, but I didn’t recall anyone mentioning his name.
Adso came stalking through the weeds, eyes intent on a fat robin poking busily for worms in the corner. I kept still, watching, admiring the lithe way in which he sank imperceptibly lower as he came more slowly, creeping on his belly for the last few feet, pausing, moving, pausing again for a long, nerve-racking second, no more than the tip of his tail a-twitch.
And then he moved, too fast for the eye to see, and in a brief and soundless explosion of feathers, it was over.
“Well done, cat,” I said, though in fact the sudden violence had startled me a little. He paid no attention but leapt through a low spot in the fence, his prey in his mouth, and disappeared to enjoy his meal.
I stood still for a moment. I wasn’t looking for Malva; the Ridge folk said that her ghost haunted the garden, wailing for her child. Just the sort of thing they would think, I thought, rather uncharitably. I hoped her spirit had fled and was at peace. But I couldn’t help thinking, too, of Rachel, so very different a soul, but a young mother, as well, so near her time, and so nearby.
My old gardening knife was long gone. But Jamie had made me a new one during the winter evenings in Savannah, the handle carved from whalebone, shaped, as the last one had been, to fit my hand. I took it from its sheath in my pocket and nicked my wrist, not stopping to think.
The white scar at the base of my thumb had faded, no more now than a thin line, almost lost in the lines that scored my palm. Still legible, though, if you knew where to look: the letter “J” he had cut into my flesh just before Culloden. Claiming me.
I massaged the flesh near the cut gently, until a full red drop ran down the side of my wrist and fell to the ground at the foot of the pokeweed.
“Blood for blood,” I said, the words quiet in themselves but seeming drowned by the rustle of leaves all around. “Rest ye quiet, child—and do no harm.”
DO NO HARM. Well, you tried. As doctor, as lover, as mother and wife. I said a silent goodbye to the garden and went up the hill, toward the MacDonalds’ cottage.
How would Jamie do it? I wondered, and was surprised to find that I did wonder, and wondered in a purely dispassionate way. He’d taken the rifle. Would he pick the man off at a distance, as if he were a deer at water? A clean shot, the man dead before he knew it.
Or would he feel he must confront the man, tell him why he was about to die—offer him a chance to fight for his life? Or just walk up with the cold face of vengeance, say nothing, and kill the man with his hands?
“Ye canna have been marrit to a Hieland man all these years and not ken how deep they can hate.”
I really didn’t want to know.
Ian had shot Allan Christie with an arrow, as one would put down a rabid dog, and for precisely similar reasons.
I’d seen Jamie’s hate flame bright the night he saved me and said to his men, “Kill them all.”
How was it now for him? If the man had been found on that night, there would have been no question that he would die. Should it be different now, only because time had passed?
I walked in the sun now but still felt cold, the shadows of Malva’s Garden with me. The matter was out of my hands; no longer my business, but Jamie’s.
I MET JENNY on the path, coming up briskly, a basket on her arm and her face alight with excitement.
“Already?” I exclaimed.
“Aye, Matthew MacDonald came down a half hour ago to say her water’s broken. He’s gone to find Ian now.”
He had found Ian; we met the two young men in the dooryard of the cabin, Matthew bright red with excitement, Ian white as a sheet under his tan. The door of the cabin was open; I could hear the murmur of women’s voices inside.
“Mam,” Ian said huskily, seeing Jenny. His shoulders, stiff with terror, relaxed a little.
“Dinna fash yourself, a bhalaich,” she said comfortably, and smiled sympathetically at him. “Your auntie and I have done this a time or two before. It will be all right.”
“Grannie! Grannie!” I turned to find Germain and Fanny, both covered with dirt and with sticks and leaves in their hair, faces bright with excitement. “Is it true? Is Rachel having her baby? Can we watch?”