Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (43 page)

HOW OLD WAS
Mrs. Cunningham? I wondered. She looked older with her clothes on. Three husbands, four children—but death was a casual and frequent visitor in these days. Her hands were old, with thick blue veins and knobbed joints, but still agile; she blotted the blood away with a damp cloth, brushed the soft brown hair from the intact side of Amy’s skull, and, arranging it carefully to hide as much damage as she could, braided it into a single thick plait that she laid gently on Amy’s breast.

I’d taken care of the eye—it was sitting on the counter behind me; I’d wrap it discreetly and tuck it into the shroud—and inserted a small wad of lint into the crushed socket, stitching the lid shut over it. There was no concealing that Amy had died by violence, but at least her family would still be able to look at her.

“Mrs….do you mind if I call you by your Christian name?” I asked abruptly.

She glanced up from her contemplation of the corpse, slightly startled.

“Elspeth,” she said.

“Claire,” I said, and smiled at her. I thought a smile touched her own lips, but before I could be sure, the quilt hanging over the doorway twitched violently and one of Gillebride’s big bear dogs shouldered his way in, sniffing eagerly along the floor.

“And what do you think
you’re
doing?” I asked. The dog ignored me and made a beeline for the counter, where he rose gracefully onto his hind legs, gulped the eye, and then dropped and ran out in answer to his master’s annoyed call from the hallway.

Elspeth and I stood in frozen silence as the hunting party departed noisily through the front door, the dogs yelping in happy excitement.

As the house fell quiet, Elspeth blinked. She looked down at Amy, peaceful and composed in the embroidered shroud she had woven while expecting her first child. It was edged with a trailing vine, with pink and blue flowers and yellow bees.

“Aye, well,” she said at last. “I dinna suppose it matters so much whether a person’s eaten by worms or by dogs.” She sounded dubious, though, and I suppressed a sudden insane urge to laugh.

“Being eaten by dogs is in the Bible,” I said, instead. “Jezebel.” She raised one sparse gray brow in surprise, evidently at the unexpected revelation that I’d actually read the Bible, but then nodded.

“Well, then,” she said.

JAMIE’S SENSE OF
grim urgency was growing more urgent—it was midafternoon already—but there was the one more thing that had to be done. He had to tell Bobby Higgins what they were about and hope that the man was either too shattered to insist on coming, or wise enough not to—and convince him that it was right for Aidan to go. He should have paused to scoop up the wee boys; they were the best reason for Bobby to stay put—but he hadn’t thought of it in time.

His anxiety was eased a good bit by the sight of Jem, loitering outside the Higgins cabin. His relief at finding the lad, though, was immediately tempered by Jem’s impassioned desire to join the hunting party.

“If Aidan can go—” Jem said, for roughly the fourth time, chin jutting out. Jamie bent down and grabbed him by the arm, speaking low so as not to upset Aidan.

“
Your
mother wasna eaten by a bear, and she’ll no be pleased if you are. Ye’re stayin’.”

“Then Aidan shouldn’t go! His da won’t like it if he gets eaten, will he?”

That was a thought that had been gnawing at Jamie, but he didn’t repent allowing the boy to come.

“His mother
was
eaten by a bear, and he’s the right to come and see her avenged,” he said to Jem. He let go of the lad’s arm, took him by the shoulder, and turned him toward the cabin. “Go get your da; I want to talk to him.”

The other members of the hunting party were restive, and he told Ian to go on ahead with Gillebride and the dogs, see if they could get upon Germain’s track. Aidan looked wild, still white-faced, his black hair stood on end, and Jamie took hold of him again to quiet him.

“Stay by me, Aidan. We willna be more than a minute, but we must tell your da what’s ado.”

It was much less than a minute before Roger came out of the cabin, blinking in the sunlight, with Jem behind him, looking excited but solemn. Roger Mac bore the same traces of shock that they all did, though he had himself well in hand, and his face relaxed a little, seeing Jamie. Then it tightened again as he saw the rifle.

“You’re—”

“We are.” He motioned the boys firmly away and dropped his voice. “I need to tell Bobby, but I dinna want him to come. Will ye help me talk him round?”

“Of course. But—” He glanced toward Aidan and Jemmy, slouched at the side of the cabin. “Ye’re not taking
them
?”

“I willna take Jem if ye say no—that’s yours to say. But I think Aidan must come.”

Roger gave him a look of intense skepticism, and Jamie shrugged.

“He must,” he repeated stubbornly. All the reasons why
not
were clustering like flies round his head, but the remembered sense of an orphaned boy’s helpless despair was an iron splinter in his heart—and that weighed heavier than the rest.

THE FIRE HAD
gone out. In the cabin, and in Bobby, too. He sat hunched and sagging in the corner of the settle by his cold hearth, head bent over his open hands as though he sought some meaning in the lines on his palms. He didn’t look up when they came in.

Jamie sank down on one knee and laid his hand over Bobby’s; it was cold and flaccid, but the fingers twitched a little.

“Robert,
a charaid,
” he said quietly. “I am going now to hunt the bear. With God’s help, we will find it and kill it. Aidan wishes to come with us, and I think it is right that he should.”

Bobby’s head rose with a jerk.

“Aidan? You want to take Aidan after the bear that—that—”

“I do.” Jamie took hold of Bobby’s other hand and squeezed them. “I swear on my own grandson’s head that I willna let any harm come to him.”

“Your—you mean Jem? You’re taking him as well?” Confusion showed briefly through the deadness in Bobby’s eyes, and he looked over Jamie’s shoulder at Roger Mac. “He is?”

“Aye.” Roger’s Mac’s voice broke on the word, but he said it, bless him. Inspiration blossomed in Jamie’s mind, and with an inward prayer, he rolled his dice.

“Roger Mac will come as well,” he said, hoping he sounded completely sure of it. “He’ll mind both lads and see them safe.” He could feel Roger Mac’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head, but he was sure it was the right thing.
Blessed Michael, guide my tongue…

“My nephew Ian and Gillebride MacMillan will be with me, with dogs. The three of us—and three dogs—will have the upper hand of a bear, no matter how fierce. Roger Mac and the lads will be there only to bear witness for your wife. At a safe distance,” he added.

Bobby sat up, pulling his hands free, and looked to and fro, agitated.

“But—but I should go with you, then. Shouldn’t I?”

Roger, recognizing his cue, cleared his throat.

“Your wee lads need ye, Bobby,” he said gently. “Ye’ve got to mind them, aye? Ye’re all they’ve got left.”

Jamie felt those words strike suddenly and without warning, deep in his own wame. Felt again a bundle of cloth clutched hard against his breast, feeling the tiny pushings of the hours-old babe inside, himself shaking with terror at what he’d just done to save the boy—his son.

That’s what he’d thought. The only thought that came through the haze of fear and shock:
His mother’s dead. I’m all he has.

And he saw it happen for Bobby, as it had for him. Saw the life fight its way back into his eyes, the bones of his body, melted with grief, begin to stiffen and form again. Bobby nodded, lips pressed tight together. Tears still ran down his face, but he rose from the settle, slow as an auld man but moving.

“Where are they?” he asked hoarsely. “Orrie and Rob?”

“With my daughter,” Jamie said. “At the house.” He lifted a brow at Roger Mac, who gave him an old-fashioned look but nodded.

“I’ll go up with ye, Bobby,” Roger Mac said, and to Jamie, “I’ll catch ye up. You and the lads.”

THE WOMEN WERE
coming. I could hear their voices, faint in the distance, coming up from the creek. That would be Gillebride’s wife, with her eldest daughter, Kirsty, and Peggy Chisholm, who lived nearby, with her two eldest, Mairi and Agnes, and Peggy’s ancient mother-in-law, Auld Mam, who was Not Right in the Head and therefore couldn’t be left alone. Then there were nearer female voices and steps in the hall, and Fanny came in, solemn-faced, with Rachel and Jenny. She glanced at the quilt-hung doorway and then averted her eyes.

I let out my breath at sight of them, and with it, the sense of being keyed up to meet something dreadful that had been with me since Jem had stumbled breathless into the surgery to tell me what had happened.

Jenny put down her basket, hugged me, quick and hard, then ducked without a word beneath the hanging quilt into the surgery. Rachel had a basket, too, and Oggy in her other arm. She detached the baby and handed him to Fanny, who looked relieved to be given something to do.

“Is thee all right, Claire?” she asked softly, then glanced at Mrs. Cunningham, who had taken up a station beside the covered surgery door, hands folded at her waist. “And thee, Friend Cunningham?”

“Yes,” I said. The odd sense of being in an intimate bubble with Elspeth Cunningham had burst at once with the advent of friends and family, but the experience had left me feeling oddly moist and exposed, like a half-opened clam. Elspeth herself had closed her shell tightly but nodded to the new arrivals. Her own near neighbors would be coming down as soon as the news reached them, but it would take some time; the Crombies’ and Wilsons’ several cabins were at least two miles from us.

Jenny was praying softly in Gaelic. I couldn’t catch the words clearly enough to know what she said, but the distinctive lilt of mourning was in it.

“Come aside,” Rachel said softly to me, and drew back the quilt a little, beckoning me with a sober nod of the head that simultaneously summoned me and indicated that no one else need follow.