Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (40 page)

“Yes, I know. But—when the Comte died, Raymond was banished, and they took him away. He couldn’t have told me then, and he might not have been able to come back before we left Paris.”

It sounded insane, even to me. But I could—just—see it: Master Raymond, stealing out of L’Hôpital des Anges after leaving me, perhaps ducking aside to avoid notice, hiding in the place where the nuns had, perhaps, laid Faith on a shelf, wrapped in her swaddling clothes. He would have known her, as he’d known me…

Everyone has a color about them,
he said simply.
All around them, like a cloud. Yours is blue, madonna. Like the Virgin’s cloak. Like my own.

One of his. The thought came out of nowhere, and I stiffened.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” What if—all right, I
was
insane, but too late for that to make a difference.

“What if he—if I, we—what if Master Raymond is—was—somehow related to me?”

Jamie said nothing, but I felt his hand move, under my hair. His middle finger folded down and the outer ones stood up straight, making the sign of the horns, against evil.

“And what if he’s not?” he said dryly. He rolled me off him and turned toward me so we were face-to-face. The darkness was slowly fading and I could see his face, drawn with tiredness, touched with sorrow and tenderness, but still determined.

“Even if
everything
ye’ve made yourself think was somehow true—and it’s not, Sassenach; ye ken it’s not—but
if
it were somehow true, it wouldna make any difference. The woman in Frances’s locket is dead now, and so is our Faith.”

His words touched the raw place in my heart, and I nodded, tears welling.

“I know,” I whispered.

“I know, too,” he whispered, and held me while I wept.

THE WEATHER WAS STILL
fine in the daytime, but the smoke shed stood in the shade of a rocky cliff. No fire had been lit in here for over a month, and the air smelled of bitter ash and the tang of old blood.

“How much do you think this thing weighs?” Brianna put both hands on the shoulder of the enormous black-and-white hog lying on the crude table by the back wall and leaned her own weight experimentally against it. The shoulder moved slightly—rigor had long since passed—but the hog itself didn’t budge an inch.

“At a guess, it originally weighed somewhat more than your father. Maybe four hundred pounds on the hoof?” Jamie had bled and gralloched the hog when he killed it; that had probably lightened his load by a hundred pounds or so, but it was still a lot of meat. A pleasant thought for the winter’s food, but a daunting prospect at the moment.

I unrolled the pocketed cloth in which I kept my larger surgical tools; this was no job for an ordinary kitchen knife.

“What do you think about the intestines?” I asked. “Usable, do you think?”

She wrinkled her nose, considering. Jamie hadn’t been able to carry much beyond the carcass itself—and in fact had dragged that—but had thoughtfully salvaged twenty or thirty pounds of intestine. He’d roughly stripped the contents, but two days in a canvas pack hadn’t improved the condition of the uncleaned entrails, not savory to start with. I’d looked at them dubiously, but put them to soak overnight in a tub of salt water, on the off chance that the tissue hadn’t broken down too far to prevent their use as sausage casing.

“I don’t know, Mama,” Bree said reluctantly. “I think they’re pretty far gone. But we might save some of it.”

“If we can’t, we can’t.” I pulled out the largest of my amputation saws and checked the teeth. “We can make square sausage, after all.” Cased sausages were much easier to preserve; once properly smoked, they’d last indefinitely. Sausage patties were fine, but took more careful handling, and had to be packed into wooden casks or boxes in layers of lard for keeping…we hadn’t any casks, but—

“Lard!” I exclaimed, looking up. “Bloody hell—I’d forgotten all about that. We don’t have a big kettle, bar the kitchen cauldron, and we can’t use that.” Rendering lard took several days, and the kitchen cauldron supplied at least half our cooked food, to say nothing of hot water.

“Can we borrow one?” Bree glanced toward the door, where a flicker of movement showed. “Jem, is that you?”

“No, it’s me, Auntie.” Germain stuck his head in, sniffing cautiously. “Mandy wanted to visit Rachel’s
petit bonbon,
and
Grand-père
said she could go if Jem or me would take her. We threw bones and he lost.”

“Oh. Fine, then. Will you go up to the kitchen and fetch the bag of salt from Grannie’s surgery?”

“There isn’t any,” I said, grasping the pig by one ear and setting the saw in the crease of the neck. “There wasn’t much, and we used all but a handful soaking the intestines. We’ll need to borrow that, too.”

I dragged the saw through the first cut, and was pleased to find that while the fascia between skin and muscle had begun to give way—the skin slipped a little with rough handling—the underlying flesh was still firm.

“I tell you what, Bree,” I said, bearing down on the saw as I felt the teeth bite between the neck bones, “it’s going to take a bit of time before I’ve got this skinned and jointed. Why don’t you call round and see which lady might lend us her rendering kettle for a couple of days, and a half pound of salt to be going on with?”

“Right,” Bree said, seizing the opportunity with obvious relief. “What should I offer her? One of the hams?”

“Oh, no, Auntie,” said Germain, quite shocked. “That’s much too much for the lend of a kettle! And ye shouldna offer anyway,” he added, small fair brows drawing together in a frown. “Ye dinna bargain a favor. She’ll ken ye’ll give her what’s right.”

She gave him a look, half questioning, half amused, then glanced at me. I nodded.

“I see I’ve been gone too long,” she said lightly, and giving Germain a pat on the head vanished on her errand.

It took a bit of force, but I’d been lucky—well, skilled, let us say in all modesty—in placing the saw, and it took only a few minutes to haggle the head off. The last strands of muscle fiber parted and the massive head dropped the few inches to the tabletop with a
thunk,
limp ears quivering from the impact. I picked it up, estimating the weight at something like thirty pounds—but of course that included the tongue and jowls…I’d take those before setting the head to seethe for brawn…that could be done overnight, though, in the kitchen kettle…I must set the oatmeal to soak the night before, then I could warm the porridge in the ashes…or perhaps fry it with some dried apples?

I was sweating lightly from the work, a welcome relief from the chill. I got the feet off, tossed them into a small bucket to be pickled, then set aside the saw and chose the large knife with the serrated blade; even untanned, pig hide was tough. I was breathing heavily by the time I’d got the carcass half flayed, and, pausing to wipe my face on my apron, I lowered it to discover that Germain was still there, sitting on a cask of salt fish Jamie had got in trade from Georg Feinbeck, one of the Moravians from Salem.

“This isn’t a spectator sport, you know,” I said, and motioned to him to come and help. “Here, take this”—I gave him one of the smaller knives—“and pull back on the skin. You don’t really need to cut much, just use the blade to push the skin away from the body.”

“I ken how, Grannie,” he said patiently, taking the knife. “It’s the same as skinning a squirrel, only bigger.”

“To a point, yes,” I said, taking his wrist to readjust his aim. “But a squirrel, you’re skinning all of a piece, for the pelt. We need to take the hog’s hide off in pieces, but make sure the pieces are big enough to be useful—you can make a pair of shoes from the leather off one haunch.” I traced the line of the cuts, round the haunch, down the inside of the leg, and left him to it whilst I negotiated the forequarters.

We worked in silence for a few minutes—silence being rather uncharacteristic of Germain, but I thought him absorbed in his task—and then he stopped.

“Grannie…” he began, and something in his voice made me stop, too. I actually looked at him, for the first time since he’d come in, and I set down my knife.

“D’ye ken what
voulez-vous coucher avec moi
means?” he blurted. His face had been white and strained but flooded with color at this, making it fairly evident that
he
knew.

“Yes,” I said, as calmly as possible. “Did someone say that to you, sweetheart?” Who, I wondered. I hadn’t heard of a French-speaker anywhere in miles of the Ridge. And one who might—

“Well…Fanny,” he blurted again, and went purple. He was still holding his skinning knife, and his small knuckles were white from gripping it.
Fanny?
I thought, stunned.

“Really,” I said carefully. Reaching out slowly, I took the knife from his hand and set it down next to the half-flayed hog. “It’s a bit close in here. Let’s go outside for a breath of air, shall we?”

I didn’t realize just how oppressive the atmosphere in the smoke shed was until we stepped out into a whirl of wind, fresh and full of yellow leaves. I heard Germain take a deep, gasping breath, and breathed deep, too. In spite of what he’d just told me, I felt a bit better. So did he; his face had gone back to something near its normal color, though still pink in the ears. I smiled at him, and he smiled uncertainly back.

“Let’s go up to the springhouse,” I said, turning toward the path. “I fancy a cup of cold milk, and I daresay Grandda would like some cheese with his supper.

“So,” I went on casually, leading the way up the path. “Where were you and Fanny when she happened to say that to you?”

“Down by the creek, Grannie,” he said readily enough. “She got leeches on her legs and I was pullin’ ’em off for her.”

Well, that’s quite the romantic setting,
I thought but didn’t say, envisioning Fanny sitting on a rock with her skirts hiked up, long coltish legs white and leech-spattered.

“See,” he went on, and came up beside me, now anxious to explain, “I was teachin’ her
le Français,
she wants to learn it, so I was telling her the words for leech, and waterweed, and how to say things like, ‘Give me food, please,’ and ‘Go away, ye wicked sod.’ ”

“How
do
you say, ‘Go away, you wicked sod’?” I asked, diverted.

“Va t’en, espèce de méchant,”
he said, shrugging.

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “Never know when it might come in handy.”

He didn’t respond; plainly the matter occupying his mind was too serious for diversion. He’d been badly shocked, I saw.

“How did you happen to know what
voulez-vous coucher
means, Germain?” I asked curiously. “Did Fanny tell you?”

He hunched his shoulders and blew out his cheeks like a bullfrog, then shook his head, letting his breath go.

“No. Papa said it to
Maman
one night, whilst she was cooking supper, and she laughed and said…something I didna quite hear…” He looked away. “So I asked Papa next day, and he told me.”

“I see.” He probably had, and very directly. Fergus had been born and grown up in a Paris brothel, to the age of nine, when Jamie had inadvertently collected him. He dealt with his past by being honest about it, and I didn’t suppose it would have occurred to him to evade his children’s questions, no matter what they asked.

We’d reached the new springhouse, a squat little stone-built structure straddling a likewise stone-lined ditch through which the water from the House Spring flowed. Buckets of milk and crocks of butter were sunk in the water, keeping cold, and wrapped cheeses sat quietly hardening on a shelf above, out of the reach of occasional muskrats. It was dim inside, and very cold; our breath wisped out when we stepped inside.

I took down the gourd dipper from its nail, squatted, and took the lid off the bucket that held the morning’s milk. I stirred it to mix the risen cream back in, drew a dipperful, and drank. It was cold enough to feel it sliding down my gullet, and delicious. I took a last swallow and handed Germain the dipper.

“Do you think Fanny knew what she was saying?” I asked, watching him as he squatted to draw his own milk. He didn’t look up, but he nodded, the top of his fair head bobbing over the dipper.

“Aye,” he said at last, and stood up, turning away from me as he reached up to hang the dipper on its nail. “Aye, she kent what it meant. She—she…touched me. When she said it.” Dim as it was, I could see the back of his neck darken.

“And what did you say?” I asked, hoping I sounded entirely calm.

He swung round and glared at me, as though it were somehow my fault. He had a mustache of cream, absurdly touching.

“I said awa’ and bile your heid! What else?”

“What indeed?” I said lightly. “I’ll talk to
Grand-père
about it.”

“You’re no going to tell him what Fanny said to me, are ye? I didna mean to get her in bother!”

“She’s not in trouble,” I assured him. Not the sort he meant, at least. “I just want your grandfather’s opinion about something. Now cut along”—I made a shooing gesture at him—“I have a hog to deal with.”

By contrast with what he’d just told me, three hundred pounds of pork chops, lard, and rotting intestines seemed trivial.