Diana Gabaldon: Dragonfly In Amber

“Er, maybe you’d like to do the rest yourself?” The voice came from somewhere around the level of his nose, and he opened his eyes to find a pair of deep blue eyes facing him above a wide grin. He rather weakly took the napkin she was offering him, breathing as though he had just been chased by a train.

Lowering his head to scrub at his trousers, he caught sight of Claire Randall watching him with an expression of mingled sympathy and amusement. There was nothing else visible in her expression; nothing of that flash he thought he’d seen in her eyes just before the catastrophe. Flustered as he was, it was probably his imagination, he thought. For why on earth should she have done it on purpose?

“Since when are you interested in Druids, Mama?” Brianna seemed disposed to find something hilarious in the idea; I had noticed her biting the insides of her cheeks while I was chatting with Roger Wakefield, and the grin she had been hiding then was now plastered across her face. “You going to get your own bedsheet and join up?”

“Bound to be more entertaining than hospital staff meetings every Thursday,” I said. “Bit drafty, though.” She hooted with laughter, startling two chickadees off the walk in front of us.

“No,” I said, switching to seriousness. “It isn’t the Druid ladies I’m after, so much. There’s someone I used to know in Scotland that I wanted to find, if I can. I haven’t an address for her – I haven’t been in touch with her for more than twenty years – but she had an interest in odd things like that: witchcraft, old beliefs, folklore. All that sort of thing. She once lived near here; I thought if she was still here, she might be involved with a group like that.”

“What’s her name?”

I shook my head, grabbing at the loosened clip as it slid from my curls. It slipped through my fingers and bounced into the deep grass along the walk.

“Damn!” I said, stooping for it. My fingers were unsteady as I groped through the dense stalks, and I had trouble picking up the clip, slippery with moisture from the wet grass. The thought of Geillis Duncan tended to unnerve me, even now.

“I don’t know,” I said, brushing the curls back off my flushed face. “I mean – it’s been such a long time, I’m sure she’d have a different name by now. She was widowed; she might have married again, or be using her maiden name.”

“Oh.” Brianna lost interest in the topic, and walked along in silence for a little. Suddenly she said, “What did you think of Roger Wakefield, Mama?”

I glanced at her; her cheeks were pink, but it might be from the spring wind.

“He seems a very nice young man,” I said carefully. “He’s certainly intelligent; he’s one of the youngest professors at Oxford.” The intelligence I had known about; I wondered whether he had any imagination. So often scholarly types didn’t. But imagination would be helpful.

“He’s got the grooviest eyes,” Brianna said, dreamily ignoring the question of his brain. “Aren’t they the greenest you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes, they’re very striking,” I agreed. “They’ve always been like that; I remember noticing them when I first met him as a child.”

Brianna looked down at me, frowning.

“Yes, Mother, really! Did you have to say ‘My, how you’ve grown?’ when he answered the door? How embarrassing!”

I laughed.

“Well, when you’ve last seen someone hovering round your navel, and suddenly you find yourself looking up his nose,” I defended myself, “you can’t help remarking the difference.”

“Mother!” But she fizzed with laughter.

“He has a very nice bottom, too,” I remarked, just to keep her going. “I noticed when he bent over to get the whisky.”

“Mo-THERRR! They’ll hear you!”

We were nearly at the bus stop. There were two or three women and an elderly gentleman in tweeds standing by the sign; they turned to stare at us as we came up.

“Is this the place for the Loch-side Tours bus?” I asked, scanning the bewildering array of notices and advertisements posted on the signboard.

“Och, aye,” one of the ladies said kindly. “The bus will be comin’ along in ten minutes or so.” She scanned Brianna, so clearly American in blue jeans and white windbreaker. The final patriotic note was added by the flushed face, red with suppressed laughter. “You’ll be going to see Loch Ness? Your first time, is it?”

I smiled at her. “I sailed down the loch with my husband twenty-odd years ago, but this is my daughter’s first trip to Scotland.”

“Oh, is it?” This attracted the attention of the other ladies and they crowded around, suddenly friendly, offering advice and asking questions until the big yellow bus came chugging round the corner.

Brianna paused before climbing the steps, admiring the picturesque drawing of green serpentine loops, undulating through a blue-paint lake, edged with black pines.

“This will be fun,” she said, laughing. “Think we’ll see the monster?”

“You never know,” I said.

Roger spent the rest of the day in a state of abstraction, wandering absently from one task to another. The books to be packed for donation to the Society for the Preservation of Antiquities lay spilling out of their carton, the Reverend’s ancient flatbed lorry sat in the drive with its bonnet up, halfway through a motor check, and a cup of tea sat half-drunk and milk-scummed at his elbow as he gazed blankly out at the falling rain of early evening.

What he should do, he knew, was get at the job of dismantling the heart of the Reverend’s study. Not the books; massive as that job was, it was only a matter of deciding which to keep himself, and which should be dispatched to the SPA or the Reverend’s old college library. No, sooner or later he would have to tackle the enormous desk, which had papers filling each huge drawer to the brim and protruding from its dozens of pigeonholes. And he’d have to take down and dispose of all of the miscellany decorating the cork wall that filled one side of the room; a task to daunt the stoutest heart.

Aside from a general disinclination to start the tedious job, Roger was hampered by something else. He didn’t want to be doing these things, necessary as they were; he wanted to be working on Claire Randall’s project, tracking down the clansmen of Culloden.

It was an interesting enough project in its way, though probably a minor research job. But that wasn’t it. No, he thought, if he were being honest with himself, he wanted to tackle Claire Randall’s project because he wanted to go round to Mrs. Thomas’s guesthouse and lay his results at the feet of Brianna Randall, as knights were supposed to have done with the heads of dragons. Even if he didn’t get results on that scale, he urgently wanted some excuse to see her and talk with her again.

It was a Bronzino painting she reminded him of, he decided. She and her mother both gave that odd impression of having been outlined somehow, drawn with such vivid strokes and delicate detail that they stood out from their background as though they’d been engraved on it. But Brianna had that brilliant coloring, and that air of absolute physical presence that made Bronzino’s sitters seem to follow you with their eyes, to be about to speak from their frames. He’d never seen a Bronzino painting making faces at a glass of whisky, but if there had been one, he was sure it would have looked precisely like Brianna Randall.

“Well, bloody hell,” he said aloud. “It won’t take a lot of time just to look over the records at Culloden House tomorrow, will it? You,” he said, addressing the desk and its multiple burdens, “can wait for a day. So can you,” he said to the wall, and defiantly plucked a mystery novel from the shelf. He glanced around belligerently, as though daring any of the furnishings to object, but there was no sound but the whirring of the electric fire. He switched it off and, book under his arm, left the study, flicking off the light.