The Space Between (Outlander, #7.5)(35)
“They give you food and drink,” she said, putting the flask down between the squab and the wall. “But if you take any, you lose time.”
The spurt of excitement came again, stronger.
“Lose time?” he repeated, encouraging. “How do you mean?”
She struggled to find words, smooth brow furrowed with the effort.
“They … you … one who is enchanted by them—he, it? No, he—goes into the hill, and there’s music and feasting and dancing. But in the morning, when he goes … back, it’s two hundred years later than it was when he went to feast with the … the Folk. Everybody he knew has turned to dust.”
“How interesting!” he said. It was. He also wondered, with a fresh spasm of excitement, whether the old paintings, the ones far back in the bowels of the chalk mine, might have been made by these Folk, whoever they were.
She observed him narrowly, apparently for an indication that he was a faerie. He smiled at her, though his heart was now thumping audibly in his ears. Two hundred years! For that was what Mélisande—Damn her, he thought briefly, with a pang at the reminder of Madeleine—had told him was the usual period when one traveled through stone. It could be changed by use of gemstones or blood, she said, but that was the usual. And it had been, the first time he went back.
“Don’t worry,” he said to the girl, hoping to reassure her. “I only want you to look at something. Then I’ll take you back to the convent—assuming that you still want to go there?” He lifted an eyebrow, half-teasing. It really wasn’t his intent to frighten her, though he already had, and he feared that more fright was unavoidable. He wondered just what she might do when she realized that he was in fact planning to take her underground.
* * *
Michael knelt on the seat, his head out the window of the coach, urging it on by force of will and muscle. It was nearly full dark, and the comte’s coach was visible only as a distantly moving blot. They were out of the city, though; there were no other large vehicles on the road, nor likely to be—and there were very few turnings where such a large equipage might leave the main road.
The wind blew in his face, tugging strands of hair loose so they beat about his face. It blew the faint scent of decay, too—they’d pass the cemetery in a few minutes.
He wished passionately that he’d thought to bring a pistol, a smallsword—anything! But there was nothing in the coach with him, and he had nothing on his person save his clothes and what was in his pockets: this consisting, after a hasty inventory, of a handful of coins, a used handkerchief—the one Joan had given back to him, in fact, and he crumpled it tightly in one hand—a tinderbox, a mangled paper spill, a stub of sealing wax, and a small stone he’d picked up in the street, pinkish with a yellow stripe. Perhaps he could improvise a sling with the handkerchief, he thought wildly, and paste the comte in the forehead with the stone, à la David and Goliath. And then cut off the comte’s head with the penknife he discovered in his breast pocket, he supposed.
Joan’s rosary was also in that pocket; he took it out and wound it round his left hand, holding the beads for comfort—he was too distracted to pray, beyond the words he repeated silently over and over, hardly noticing what he said.
Let me find her in time!
* * *
“Tell me,” the comte asked curiously, “why did you speak to me in the market that day?”
“I wish I hadn’t,” Joan replied briefly. She didn’t trust him an inch—still less since he’d offered her the brandy. It hadn’t struck her before that that he really might be one of the Auld Ones. They could walk about, looking just like people. Her own mother had been convinced for years—and even some of the Murrays thought so—that Da’s wife, Claire, was one. She herself wasn’t sure; Claire had been kind to her, but no one said the Folk couldn’t be kind if they wanted to.
Da’s wife. A sudden thought paralyzed her: the memory of her first meeting with Mother Hildegarde, when she’d given the Reverend Mother Claire’s letter. She’d said, “ma mère,” unable to think of a word that might mean “stepmother.” It hadn’t seemed to matter; why should anyone care?
“Claire Fraser,” she said aloud, watching the comte carefully. “Do you know her?”
His eyes widened, showing white in the gloaming. Oh, aye, he kent her, all right!
“I do,” he said, leaning forward. “Your mother, is she not?”
“No!” Joan said, with great force, and repeated it in French, several times for emphasis. “No, she’s not!”
But she observed, with a sinking heart, that her force had been misplaced. He didn’t believe her; she could tell by the eagerness in his face. He thought she was lying to put him off.
“I told you what I did in the market because the voices told me to!” she blurted, desperate for anything that might distract him from the horrifying notion that she was one of the Folk. Though if he was one, her common sense pointed out, he ought to be able to recognize her. Oh, Jesus, Lamb of God—that’s what he’d been trying to do, holding her hands so tight and staring into her face.
“Voices?” he said, looking rather blank. “What voices?”
“The ones in my head,” she said, heaving an internal sigh of exasperation. “They tell me things now and then. About other people, I mean. You know,” she went on, encouraging him, “I’m a—a”—St. Jerome on a bannock, what was the word?!?—“someone who sees the future,” she ended weakly. “Er … some of it. Sometimes. Not always.”