Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(41)
And so she prayed, with all the energy of body and mind and spirit, asking mercy. Mercy for the young man, for wee Ronnie and wretched auld Angus—mercy for poor Michael, and for the soul of Lillie, his dear wife, and their babe unborn. And mercy for herself, this unworthy vessel of God’s service.
“I’ll do better!” she promised, sniffing and wiping her nose on the fluffy towel. “Truly, I will. I’ll be braver. I will.”
MICHAEL TOOK THE candlestick from the footman, said good night, and shut the door. He hoped Sister almost-Gregory was comfortable; he’d told the staff to put her in the main guest room. He was fairly sure she’d sleep well. He smiled wryly to himself; unaccustomed to wine, and obviously nervous in company, she’d sipped her way through most of a decanter of Jerez sherry before he noticed, and was sitting in the corner with unfocused eyes and a small inward smile that reminded him of a painting he had seen at Versailles, a thing the steward had called La Gioconda.
He couldn’t very well deliver her to the convent in such a condition and had gently escorted her upstairs and given her into the hands of the chambermaids, both of whom regarded her with some wariness, as though a tipsy nun were a particularly dangerous commodity.
He’d drunk a fair amount himself in the course of the afternoon and more at dinner. He and Charles had sat up late, talking and drinking rum punch. Not talking of anything in particular; he had just wanted not to be alone. Charles had invited him to go to the gaming rooms—Charles was an inveterate gambler—but was kind enough to accept his refusal and simply bear him company.
The candle flame blurred briefly at thought of Charles’s kindness. He blinked and shook his head, which proved a mistake; the contents shifted abruptly, and his stomach rose in protest at the sudden movement. He barely made it to the chamber pot in time and, once evacuated, lay numbly on the floor, cheek pressed to the cold boards.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t get up and go to bed. It was that he couldn’t face the thought of the cold white sheets, the pillows round and smooth, as though Lillie’s head had never dented them, the bed never known the heat of her body.
Tears ran sideways over the bridge of his nose and dripped on the floor. There was a snuffling noise, and Plonplon came squirming out from under the bed and licked his face, whining anxiously. After a little while, he sat up and, leaning against the side of the bed with the dog in one arm, reached for the decanter of port that the butler had left—by instruction—on the table beside it.
THE SMELL WAS appalling. Rakoczy had wrapped a woolen comforter about his lower face, but the odor seeped in, putrid and cloying, clinging to the back of the throat, so that even breathing through the mouth didn’t preserve you from the stench. He breathed as shallowly as he could, though, picking his way carefully past the edge of the cemetery by the narrow beam of a dark lantern. The mine lay well beyond it, but the stench carried amazingly when the wind blew from the east.
The chalk mine had been abandoned for years; it was rumored to be haunted. It was. Rakoczy knew what haunted it. Never religious—he was a philosopher and a natural scientist, a rationalist—he still crossed himself by reflex at the head of the ladder that led down the shaft into those spectral depths.
At least the rumors of ghosts and earth demons and the walking dead would keep anyone from coming to investigate strange light glowing from the subterranean tunnels of the workings, if it was noticed at all. Though just in case…he opened the burlap bag, still redolent of rats, and fished out a bundle of pitchblende torches and the oiled-silk packet that held several lengths of cloth saturated with salpêtre, salts of potash, blue vitriol, verdigris, butter of antimony, and a few other interesting compounds from his laboratory.
He found the blue vitriol by smell and wrapped the cloth tightly around the head of one torch, then—whistling under his breath—made three more torches, each impregnated with different salts. He loved this part. It was so simple, and so astonishingly beautiful.
He paused for a minute to listen, but it was well past dark and the only sounds were those of the night itself—frogs chirping and bellowing in the distant marshes by the cemetery, wind stirring the leaves of spring. A few hovels sat a half mile away, only one with firelight glowing dully from a smoke hole in the roof. Almost a pity there’s no one but me to see this. He took the little clay firepot from its wrappings and touched a coal to the cloth-wrapped torch. A tiny green flame flickered like a serpent’s tongue, then burst into life in a brilliant globe of ghostly color.
He grinned at the sight, but there was no time to lose; the torches wouldn’t last forever, and there was work to be done. He tied the bag to his belt and, with the green fire crackling softly in one hand, climbed down into darkness.
He paused at the bottom, breathing deep. The air was clear, the dust long settled. No one had been down here recently. The dull white walls glowed soft, eerie under the green light, and the passage yawned before him, black as a murderer’s soul. Even knowing the place as well as he did, and with light in his hand, it gave him a qualm to walk into it.
Is that what death is like? he wondered. A black void that you walked into with no more than a feeble glimmer of faith in your hand? His lips compressed. Well, he’d done that before, if less permanently. But he disliked the way that the notion of death seemed always to be lurking in the back of his mind these days.
The main tunnel was large, big enough for two men to walk side by side, and the roof was high enough above him that the roughly excavated chalk lay in shadow, barely touched by his torch. The side tunnels were smaller, though. He counted the ones on the left and, despite himself, hurried his step a little as he passed the fourth. That was where it lay, down the side tunnel, a turn to the left, another to the left—was it “widdershins” the English called it, turning against the direction of the sun? He thought that was what Mélisande had called it when she’d brought him here….