The Outlander, page 30
The Ridgerunner abruptly stopped chewing, for there was something in the way he had said it — he was asking not why Moreland would want a woman, but why anyone would follow that woman in particular.
“I already told him we haven’t seen her,” Helen said gently.
“Why are you looking?” the man said bluntly.
William Moreland swallowed and held the bowl before him. He was pale and reduced, large-eyed in the firelight, and an expression of deep regret passed over his face. Suddenly, he looked as if he were about to weep. Henry glanced at his wife in alarm, and she put a surreptitious hand on his arm.
“Are you her husband?” Helen asked.
“No. I just . . . I need to see her. Because I owe her an apology.”
This statement confounded Henry. But Helen gazed at her guest in quiet contemplation for a long moment.
“William is your name?” she asked.
The Ridgerunner nodded.
“Well, William, perhaps you will take a look at these things I have brought out for you. Some of them are quite good. And then, once we’re done, I’ll tell you where Mary has gone.”
TWENTY-SIX
DAWN FOUND THE widow on horseback, reversed in the saddle, her wrists tied together behind her with ropes knotted round the saddle horn. Misery infused every part of her body, and she could not tell any more what was mere injury and what was the anguish of her mind. They did not speak to her, for she was nothing to them but an unfinished task, and they were much like John, they had his aloofness. It was with some incredulity that she realized their horses had been purchased from the Cregans. She herself was mounted backward on Sean Cregan’s clever little mare. This fact wounded her more than she could admit, but she told herself she should not be surprised, for the eight boys were thieves and businessmen.
At first, the twins had split up, one leading the way, the other riding behind, guarding her. In this way, she was face to face with one of them. Jude or Julian, she didn’t know which — so similar to John it was unnerving to look at him. His face was bloodless, ashen, his massive shoulders hunched over the saddle, and he glowered at her. All she remembered about these two was her husband’s directions to her before they had arrived at the cabin for one of their few visits. “Don’t contradict Julian,” he said. “He doesn’t take it.” A simple statement, but in the shorthand of that family a potent warning.
They rode down a winding path through the cedars where there was no underbrush and the ground was light as cured hide, smooth and carpeted with leaves. As they went, the widow shifted on her mount as if to adjust her seat to a more comfortable position, but she was working at the ropes behind her.
“Cut it out,” he said. She heard something in his voice, some hint of pain or inner gloom. She looked closely at him, saw the coat flap bow open with each hooVall, revealing the fine shirt inside, on which had spread a dark stain. The same shadow crept the edges of his long coat, where blood had soaked the lining and now mackled the outer cloth. He saw her looking, pulled the coat closed. She knew then which one he was — Jude, the lesser twin, for he bore his injury as patiently as a dog.
“Does it hurt?”
“You shut your mouth.”
A wrathful flush to her cheeks. Not a wink, not a shift of her gaze, for she was no longer afraid. Instead, a fury had come over her. She could not take her eyes off him, and in her mind she was leading him again — the quarry rushing low and awkward, following the rifle barrel, running toward that moment. Perhaps he sensed her thoughts, because he blurted out, “All this, all of this hell, is because of you. Are you proud of what you did?” He had spoken only to galvanize himself against her stare. She realized there was something about her that he had not expected, or had forgotten, and it was draining the purpose from him.
“No,” she said. “I’m not proud of what I did.”
“But you’re not sorry, are you? Do you feel any regret at all?”
“A little.”
“You are an abomination,” he said.
“And what are you?” she spat. “Half a man!”
His expression froze and, bit by bit, he sank away from her. Half a man, and fading. He simply drew his coat closer, as if she had never said a word. After a few miles he chucked his horse forward and joined his brother at the front, leaving the widow to her thoughts.
She swayed with the converse gait of the horse, watching with dull eyes as her home drifted away. Well, after all, what home did she have now that Bonny was gone? Now the town was gone? There was nothing left. Like the Ridgerunner, she had been hobbled by misfortune and finally caught.
The trees thinned out as the mountains withered and lost character and became merely blue. When she craned around, she could see the beginnings of fields, sloped and undulating areas of cultivation marked out in shades of white or yellow, cut by incursions of leafy trees. Farmland. She spied houses, smoke rising. The air was warm and muggy, and she began to sweat in her hide clothes.
They passed through a grove of massive poplars with wind-bent trunks. She looked up. Every leaf was moving furiously, a sourceless churning, and the sound was like applause. The horses stepped along, Queen Anne’s lace reaching to their bellies. Their trail was visible through the long grasses, and it streamed back to where she had been. This is the progress of life, she thought sadly, seeing only what has been and is now gone, dragged away from our beginning, a child riding the resolute shoulder toward bed.
“YOU’RE HERE FOR three days,” the man said. “Just till the judge comes, and then you and them two are off out of here.” He stood in the hallway just beyond the door, which was made of metal bars.
“What is this place called?” the widow asked.
“This? Nothing. This is the old bank. We got a new one now, made of brick. Just up the street there.”
“No, I mean the town.”
“Oh. You’re in Willow Cane.” He stared at her through the bars a moment while rain steamed on the barred sill behind her. She could smell it, the scent of hot dust and water. A stale but living smell.
“Did you do it?” he asked. His tone was so casual the widow didn’t at first know what he meant. And then she did. It hadn’t occurred to her that anyone might ask that question, her guilt being so patent it must be part of the air she breathed. And yet here he was, asking, and he seemed truly curious.
“Yes,” she said, “I did it.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed it, you being a girl. What’d you do it with?”
“His rifle.”
“Not so? The man’s own rifle.” He took off his hat and held it before him as if in the presence of someone above him.
“Where’d ya shoot him? In the head?”
Despite herself, the widow winced. “No.”
“Where then? Not in the back?”
“Do you really need to know?”
“Not so much. I’m just . . . well, I’m curious.”
The widow sat down on her pallet with a sigh. “In the leg.” She put a hand across her thigh like a cleaver. The man pondered that for a while, spinning his hat in his hands like a little wheel, churning through the conundrum.
“How long’d that take?” he said. It was like he was asking how long it took to get to the next town. “Must’ve taken a while, just bleeding like that.”
“No,” she said. “Not long at all.”
“Was he bad to you?”
The man’s inquisitive face, bland and waiting beyond the bars, was like a sign held up before her, full of wordless meaning and promising retribution. A feeling like panic rose in her throat and her head began to pound, a painful surfeit of blood pumping there. No more answers for the merely curious. For they would provide her with nothing, and there was no escape. She sat mute upon her bed.
“Well,” the man said to himself, pensive, “I never saw a murderess before.” A thin rumble of thunder passed somewhere far away. Rain hissed. “You don’t look like one,” he offered and walked away. Almost immediately he was back, looking through the bars again. When he spoke, his voice was friendly.
“If you know what’s good for you,” he said, “you won’t tell them what you told me. Just keep saying you didn’t do it.”
THE RAIN CONTINUED through the afternoon, hissing through the trees and pooling in the grass. Mary sat on her bunk and ran her hands down her thighs over the soft deerskin, her fretful fingers checking and rechecking the seams unconsciously. Despite the heaviness of the air, she began to smell cooking, a chicken roasting. She had nothing to do. She was not expected to cook or do laundry, she did not have to chop wood or stoke the stove or sweep or hunt or try to stay warm or plan in the least degree for anything. In her head a little chime kept going off — do something, do something. But her survival was out of her own hands now. She was expected only to wait. Little surges of dread rose and subsided within her, and she attended to these waves and endured them.
She sighed and stood up. There were shutters on the window that looked like they had never been used. Their hinges had rusted open. If she pressed her face to the bars, she could see a sliver of the street. Once in a while someone would hurry by, a hunched blur, and then they were gone.
Over the next hour the rain stopped. It grew dark and the lights went on in houses nearby so the canopy of the trees lit up. There came the voices of children. Dinner was over. A hammering sound echoed from somewhere across the street, metal on metal. She stood by her window and breathed the wet air in deeply, felt on her face the breeze that came and went as it wished, right through the bars. Little spatters from the trees blew in over her bed and into her face. She pictured the Ridgerunner, decades ago, pacing his cell, maddened by confinement, while the barred door stood open to him. Why had this man, so adept at escape, not fled the courthouse jail? He did not belong to this world, he never would. Why had he tolerated the grinding process of the law? Curiosity was the only answer — William Moreland, a hermit of grand proportion, who could not stand the trappings of civilization, the fences and roads and rules, was curious about people. It was one thing she did not share with him.
She looked about at her own cell. A heavy metal door with bars, a well-framed oak door jamb, and a brass lock. Several pale circumscriptions on the walls suggested long-resident furniture, now departed — so it had perhaps been an office or even a counting room, unwisely equipped with a window. She put a hand round one of the bars and shook it experimentally. A dry grinding issued from the mortar, and dust filtered down along the wall’s uneven plaster.
There was a noise behind her and she turned, startled. A young woman stood in the outside hall beyond the barred door, a tray in her hands. The man from earlier was somewhere down the hall, noisily going through drawers. The girl seemed uncomfortable with the waiting. After a long moment, the man appeared at the door and worked the lock open, and the girl took one step inside the cell and halted.
“Go on,” he said, “she’s not going to eat you.”
The girl blushed deeply and forced herself forward to the spindly chair by the wall where she set the tray down. The food on the tray smelled familiar, and the widow reasoned that its cook must live nearby. Then the girl hurried from the room, turning the corner so sharply she caught her sleeve on the doorframe.
The man stood with a bemused look on his face and watched the girl as she left the building. Rolling his eyes at the widow, he stepped back and locked the door again. “Just like a squirrel,” he said, “scared of everything.” He went jingling down the hall.
The widow heard a drawer rasp open somewhere, followed by the hollow sound of keys being dropped and hitting wood. An empty drawer. She listened intently, her eyes going unfocused. A few footsteps. A thump. Then silence for a long time. Had he left and gone home too? Was the building empty, then, utterly functionless except to house her? She called out, but no one called back to her. Some airborne sweetness drifted in through the bars behind her, some late summer tree in bloom, erupting with the recent rain. A sweetness that mixed with the scent of the cooling chicken on her tray and leant the little cell an air of putrefaction.
She went over to the chair and looked down at the food. A glass of milk. She took it up and drank slowly, unable to remember the last time she had tasted milk. Carrots and yam and roast chicken, presented prettily on a bone china plate decorated with a cramped pattern of tiny gold and green roses. Someone had decanted a little gravy into what looked like a tea creamer and set it beside the plate. A bowl with angel food cake stained deeply by ripe blueberries. The widow’s expression was that of a woman about to descend into a dank basement — part dread, part determination. She longed to eat but worried the food might not stay down. She bent to see under the cot, where there was a small bedpan. She fetched it out with the toe of her boot, just in case, and then she sat down and placed the tray over her knees, and took up the knife and fork.
THE OLD DOCTOR stopped rooting in the bullet hole, removed the bloodied forceps, and peered closely at the wound. His face was inches from the patient’s chest so that his breath blew across the ginger hair. Jude sat up, panting on the table while his brother held his naked shoulders to steady him. His entire chest was black and blue. A dark puncture near the collarbone.
“Huh,” the doctor grunted.
“What?” Julian’s anxious face appeared over his brother’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t know.” He slid the forceps gently back into the trickling wound and began scrounging again while Jude held his breath. There was a barely audible sound of metal on metal. And then the doctor withdrew a tiny shard of the bullet, no bigger than a lost tooth filling and just as shapeless. Jude put his hand out and the doctor dropped the shard into it. All three men looked at it.
“I was afraid of that,” said the doctor. “Lots of little pieces in there. Doubt I can get them all.”
Someone came into the outer room and called, “Dad?”
“Here!” he bellowed. Then he rose from his seat and strode to the cabinet to get some sterile pads, holding the probe behind his back while he searched. A young man peered around the door frame — he looked at the brothers and did a doubletake. Quickly he withdrew again.
The metal stool spun slowly from the force of the doctor’s departure. The brothers remained where they were, one holding the other up.
Julian’s voice came quietly. “How do you feel?”
Jude shook his head. “Only half dead.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
IN THE DYING moments of twilight, when the widow’s cell was dark and the outside sky presented itself as pink and misty and cut by bars, there came over the muggy air the sound of bats, their voices dry metallic clicks, like someone trying to wind a rusty clock. The widow lay on her back on the bunk. Her fingers played with the grit that clung to the blanket, rock dust that had sprinkled down from her vain attempts to shake the window bars out. She could not stop considering the objects in her room as some kind of disassembled key to her escape: a chair, a cot, a dinner tray, a bedpan. She went over them all in her mind, unable to stop searching for a solution she knew was not there. A dog barked disinterestedly from inside some echoing place, a barn or shed, answered by other dogs in the dusk.
She sat up, took the tray from the floor, and set it on her lap again, trying to get a little more food in. She had eaten the angel food cake slowly. It was dry and fragrant and weightless. Now she began to work on the white slabs of chicken meat, dipping each slice in gravy. Pausing before putting it in her mouth. It tasted wonderful, and slowly the nausea subsided. Perhaps the sickness had to do with lack of food rather than the food itself.
She began to hear things. A woman’s voice. A thump.
Down the hallway came candlelight, trembling, growing in intensity. There were two voices. Then came the sound of a drawer being opened, a few words of argument between a woman and a man. The keys came out, and the light came up the hall toward her cell. The man was at the door again. He unlocked it and went away again, leaving a woman. She was slim and grey-haired and fit, holding a candle. She waited for a moment by the door, seeing the widow still at work on her dinner, and then she went and sat by the wall on the little chair. Prim as a schoolmistress, a woman of long hands and face, wasp-waisted.
“Is the food not good?”
The widow had heard that tone in her own voice, the undercurrent of bafflement that after such efforts in cooking the dinner was not appreciated. She nodded vigorously, still chewing.
“It’d be cold by now,” the woman said, dubiously.
“No, it’s very good. Did you cook it yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Then you live near here?”
The woman was silent for a moment, wondering, her grey eyes twinkling in the poor light. Then she laughed.
“You could smell it cooking! Of course.”
The widow picked delicately at the scraps on the plate, caught up the last of the yam with her fork, put the bowl down and the tray to one side and checked her mouth for crumbs, and sighed with contentment, despite her watcher.
The woman leaned out the open cell door and bellowed, “Allan, will you please come and get the tray?” There was a muffled curse, and the man came down the hall. He took up the tray and was about to collect the candle, but the woman said, “No, leave that.”
“Does her majesty want anything else?” he said.
She gave him a withering look, and he left again, trudging carefully down the darkened hallway, the tray jingling slightly, like dull bells. When he was gone, the woman leaned forward and whispered, “You know they’re out there, don’t you? Both of them.”
