The Space Between (Outlander, #7.5) by Diana Gabaldon
Paris, March 1778
He still didn’t know why the frog hadn’t killed him. Paul Rakoczy, Comte St. Germain, picked up the vial, pulled the cork, and sniffed cautiously, for the third time, but then recorked it, still dissatisfied. Maybe. Maybe not. The scent of the dark-gray powder in the vial held the ghost of something familiar—but it had been thirty years.
He sat for a moment, frowning at the array of jars, bottles, flasks, and pelicans on his workbench. It was late afternoon, and the early spring sun of Paris was like honey, warm and sticky on his face, but glowing in the rounded globes of glass, throwing pools of red and brown and green on the wood from the liquids contained therein. The only discordant note in this peaceful symphony of light was the body of a large rat, lying on its back in the middle of the workbench, a pocket watch open beside it.
The comte put two fingers delicately on the rat’s chest and waited patiently. It didn’t take so long this time; he was used to the coldness as his mind felt its way into the body. Nothing. No hint of light in his mind’s eye, no warm red of a pulsing heart. He glanced at the watch: half an hour.
He took his fingers away, shaking his head.
“Mélisande, you evil bitch,” he murmured, not without affection. “You didn’t think I’d try anything you sent me on myself, did you?”
Still … he himself had stayed dead a great while longer than half an hour when the frog had given him the dragon’s blood. It had been early evening when he went into Louis’s Star Chamber thirty years before, heart beating with excitement at the coming confrontation—a duel of wizards, with a king’s favor as the stakes—and one he’d thought he’d win. He remembered the purity of the sky, the beauty of the stars just visible, Venus bright on the horizon, and the joy of it in his blood. Everything always had a greater intensity when you knew life could cease within the next few minutes.
And an hour later he thought his life had ceased, the cup falling from his numbed hand, the coldness rushing through his limbs with amazing speed, freezing the words “I’ve lost,” an icy core of disbelief in the center of his mind. He hadn’t been looking at the frog; the last thing he had seen through darkening eyes was the woman—La Dame Blanche—her face over the cup she’d given him appalled and white as bone. But what he recalled, and recalled again now, with the same sense of astonishment and avidity, was the great flare of blue, intense as the color of the evening sky beyond Venus, that had burst from her head and shoulders as he died.
He didn’t recall any feeling of regret or fear, just astonishment. This was nothing, however, to the astonishment he’d felt when he regained his senses, naked on a stone slab in a revolting subterranean chamber next to a drowned corpse. Luckily, there had been no one alive in that disgusting grotto, and he had made his way—reeling and half blind, clothed in the drowned man’s wet and stinking shirt—out into a dawn more beautiful than any twilight could ever be. So—ten to twelve hours from the moment of apparent death to revival.
He glanced at the rat, then put out a finger and lifted one of the small, neat paws. Nearly twelve hours. Limp; the rigor had already passed. It was warm up here at the top of the house. Then he turned to the counter that ran along the far wall of the laboratory, where a line of rats lay, possibly insensible, probably dead. He walked slowly along the line, prodding each body. Limp, limp, stiff. Stiff. Stiff. All dead, without doubt. Each had had a smaller dose than the last, but all had died—though he couldn’t yet be positive about the latest. Wait a bit more, then, to be sure.
He needed to know. Because the Court of Miracles was talking. And they said the frog was back.
The English Channel
They did say that red hair was a sign of the devil. Joan eyed her escort’s fiery locks consideringly. The wind on deck was fierce enough to make her eyes water, and it jerked bits of Michael Murray’s hair out of its binding so they did dance round his head like flames, a bit. You might expect his face to be ugly as sin if he was one of the devil’s, though, and it wasn’t.
Lucky for him, he looked like his mother in the face, she thought critically. His younger brother, Ian, wasn’t so fortunate, and that without the heathen tattoos. Michael’s was a fairly pleasant face, for all it was blotched with windburn and the lingering marks of sorrow, and no wonder, him having just lost his father, and his wife dead in France no more than a month before that.
But she wasn’t braving this gale in order to watch Michael Murray, even if he might burst into tears or turn into Auld Horny on the spot. She touched her crucifix for reassurance, just in case. It had been blessed by the priest, and her mother’d carried it all the way to St. Ninian’s Spring and dipped it in the water there, to ask the saint’s protection. And it was her mother she wanted to see, as long as ever she could.
She pulled her kerchief off and waved it, keeping a tight grip lest the wind make off with it. Her mother was growing smaller on the quay, waving madly too, Joey behind her with his arm round her waist to keep her from falling into the water.
Joan snorted a bit at sight of her new stepfather but then thought better and touched the crucifix again, muttering a quick Act of Contrition in penance. After all, it was she herself who’d made that marriage happen, and a good thing, too. If not, she’d still be stuck to home at Balriggan, not on her way at last to be a Bride of Christ in France.