Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(82)

“Do they?” he murmured. The creature—well, the man, he was now sure of that—who had attacked him had not been stiff and slow, by any means. Ergo…

“I’m told, madam, that most of your slaves are Ashanti. Would any of them know more about this process?”

“No,” she said abruptly, sitting up a little. “I learnt what I ken from a houngan—that would be a sort of…practitioner, I suppose ye’d say. He wasna one of my slaves, though.”

“A practitioner of what, exactly?”

Her tongue passed slowly over the tips of her sharp teeth, yellowed but still sound.

“Of magic,” she said, and laughed softly, as though to herself. “Aye, magic. African magic. Slave magic.”

“You believe in magic?” He asked it as much from curiosity as anything else.

“Don’t you?” Her brows rose, but he shook his head.

“I do not. And from what you have just told me yourself, the process of creating—if that’s the word—a zombie is not in fact magic but merely the administration of poison over a period of time, added to the power of suggestion.” Another thought struck him. “Can a person recover from such poisoning? You say it does not kill them.”

She shook her head.

“The poison doesn’t, no. But they always die. They starve, for one thing. They lose all notion of will and canna do anything save what the houngan tells them to do. Gradually they waste away to nothing, and—” Her fingers snapped silently.

“Even were they to survive,” she went on practically, “the people would kill them. Once a person’s been made a zombie, there’s nay way back.”

Throughout the conversation, Grey had become aware that Mrs. Abernathy spoke from what seemed a much closer acquaintance with the notion than one might acquire from an idle interest in natural philosophy. He wanted to get away from her but obliged himself to sit still and ask one more question.

“Do you know of any particular significance attributed to snakes, madam? In African magic, I mean.”

She blinked, somewhat taken aback by that.

“Snakes,” she repeated slowly. “Aye. Well…snakes ha’ wisdom, they say. And some o’ the loas are snakes.”

“Loas?”

She rubbed absently at her forehead, and he saw, with a small prickle of revulsion, the faint stippling of a rash. He’d seen that before: the sign of advanced syphilitic infection.

“I suppose ye’d call them spirits,” she said, and eyed him appraisingly. “D’ye see snakes in your dreams, Colonel?”

“Do I—no. I don’t.” He didn’t, but the suggestion was unspeakably disturbing. She smiled.

“A loa rides a person, aye? Speaks through them. And I see a great huge snake lyin’ on your shoulders, Colonel.” She heaved herself abruptly to her feet.

“I’d be careful what ye eat, Colonel Grey.”



THEY RETURNED TO Spanish Town two days later. The ride back gave Grey time for thought, from which he drew certain conclusions. Among these conclusions was the conviction that maroons had not, in fact, attacked Rose Hall. He had spoken to Mrs. Abernathy’s overseer, who seemed reluctant and shifty, very vague on the details of the presumed attack. And later…

After his conversations with the overseer and several slaves, he had gone back to the house to take formal leave of Mrs. Abernathy. No one had answered his knock, and he had walked round the house in search of a servant. What he had found instead was a path leading downward from the house, with a glimpse of water at the bottom.

Out of curiosity, he had followed this path and found the infamous spring in which Mrs. Abernathy had presumably sought refuge from the murdering intruders. Mrs. Abernathy was in the spring, naked, swimming with slow composure from one side to the other, white-streaked fair hair streaming out behind her.

The water was crystalline; he could see the fleshy pumping of her buttocks, moving like a bellows that propelled her movements—and glimpsed the purplish hollow of her sex, exposed by the flexion. There were no banks of concealing reeds or other vegetation; no one could have failed to see the woman if she’d been in the spring—and, plainly, the temperature of the water was no dissuasion to her.

So she’d lied about the maroons. He had a cold certainty that Mrs. Abernathy had murdered her husband, or arranged it—but there was little he was equipped to do with that conclusion. Arrest her? There were no witnesses—or none who could legally testify against her, even if they wanted to. And he rather thought that none of her slaves would want to; those he had spoken with had displayed extreme reticence with regard to their mistress. Whether that was the result of loyalty or fear, the effect would be the same.

What the conclusion did mean to him was that the maroons were in fact likely not guilty of murder, and that was important. So far, all reports of mischief involved only property damage—and that, only to fields and equipment. No houses had been burned, and while several plantation owners had claimed that their slaves had been taken, there was no proof of this; the slaves in question might simply have taken advantage of the chaos of an attack to run.

This spoke to him of a certain amount of care on the part of whoever led the maroons. Who did? he wondered. What sort of man? The impression he was gaining was not that of a rebellion—there had been no declaration, and he would have expected that—but of the boiling over of a long-simmering frustration. He had to speak with Captain Cresswell. And he hoped that bloody secretary had managed to find the superintendent by the time he reached King’s House.