Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

by Diana Gabaldon

  The maid came in with two enormous cans of steaming water and upended these into the bath with a tremendous splash. Another came in on her heels, similarly equipped, and between them they had Joan up, stripped, and stepping into the tub before she’d so much as said the first word of the Lord’s Prayer for the third decade.

  They said French things to her, which she didn’t understand, and held out peculiar-looking instruments to her in invitation. She recognized the small pot of soap and pointed at it, and one of them at once poured water on her head and began to wash her hair!

  She had for months been bidding farewell to her hair whenever she combed it, quite resigned to its loss, for whether she must sacrifice it immediately, as a postulant, or later, as a novice, plainly it must go. The shock of knowing fingers rubbing her scalp, the sheer sensual delight of warm water coursing through her hair, the soft wet weight of it lying in ropes down over her breasts—was this God’s way of asking if she’d truly thought it through? Did she know what she was giving up?

  Well, she did, then. And she had thought about it. On the other hand…she couldn’t make them stop, really; it wouldn’t be mannerly. The warmth of the water was making the wine she’d drunk course faster through her blood, and she felt as though she were being kneaded like toffee, stretched and pulled, all glossy and falling into languid loops. She closed her eyes and gave up trying to remember how many Hail Marys she had yet to go in the third decade.

  It wasn’t until the maids had hauled her, pink and steaming, out of the bath and wrapped her in a most remarkable huge fuzzy kind of towel that she emerged abruptly from her sensual trance. The cold air coalesced in her stomach, reminding her that all this luxury was indeed a lure of the devil—for lost in gluttony and sinful bathing, she’d forgot entirely about the young man on the ship, the poor despairing sinner who had thrown himself into the sea.

  The maids had gone for the moment. She dropped at once to her knees on the stone floor and threw off the coddling towels, exposing her bare skin to the full chill of the air in penance.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” she breathed, knocking a fist against her bosom in a paroxysm of sorrow and regret. The sight of the drowned young man was in her mind, soft brown hair fanned across his cheek, eyes half closed, seeing nothing—and what terrible thing was it that he’d seen, or thought of, before he jumped, that he’d screamed so?

  She thought briefly of Michael, the look on his face when he spoke of his poor wife—perhaps the young brown-haired man had lost someone dear and couldn’t face his life alone?

  She should have spoken to him. That was the undeniable, terrible truth. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know what to say. She should have trusted God to give her words, as he had when she’d spoken to Michael.

  “Forgive me, Father!” she said urgently, out loud. “Please—forgive me, give me strength!”

  She’d betrayed that poor young man. And herself. And God, who’d given her the terrible gift of sight for a reason. And the voices…

  “Why did ye not tell me?” she cried. “Have ye nothing to say for yourselves?” Here she’d thought the voices those of angels, and they weren’t—just drifting bits of bog mist, getting into her head, pointless, useless…useless as she was, oh, Lord Jesus…

  She didn’t know how long she knelt there, naked, half drunk, and in tears. She heard the muffled squeaks of dismay from the French maids, who poked their heads in and just as quickly withdrew them, but paid no attention. She didn’t know if it was right even to pray for the poor young man—for suicide was a mortal sin, and surely he’d gone straight to hell. But she couldn’t give him up; she couldn’t. She felt somehow that he’d been her charge, that she’d carelessly let him fall, and surely God would not hold the young man entirely responsible when it was she who should have been watching out for him.

  And so she prayed, with all the energy of body and mind and spirit, asking mercy. Mercy for the young man, for wee Ronnie and wretched auld Angus—mercy for poor Michael, and for the soul of Lillie, his dear wife, and their babe unborn. And mercy for herself, this unworthy vessel of God’s service.

  “I’ll do better!” she promised, sniffing and wiping her nose on the fluffy towel. “Truly, I will. I’ll be braver. I will.”

  MICHAEL TOOK THE candlestick from the footman, said good night, and shut the door. He hoped Sister almost-Gregory was comfortable; he’d told the staff to put her in the main guest room. He was fairly sure she’d sleep well. He smiled wryly to himself; unaccustomed to wine, and obviously nervous in company, she’d sipped her way through most of a decanter of Jerez sherry before he noticed, and was sitting in the corner with unfocused eyes and a small inward smile that reminded him of a painting he had seen at Versailles, a thing the steward had called La Gioconda.

  He couldn’t very well deliver her to the convent in such a condition and had gently escorted her upstairs and given her into the hands of the chambermaids, both of whom regarded her with some wariness, as though a tipsy nun were a particularly dangerous commodity.

  He’d drunk a fair amount himself in the course of the afternoon and more at dinner. He and Charles had sat up late, talking and drinking rum punch. Not talking of anything in particular; he had just wanted not to be alone. Charles had invited him to go to the gaming rooms—Charles was an inveterate gambler—but was kind enough to accept his refusal and simply bear him company.

  The candle flame blurred briefly at thought of Charles’s kindness. He blinked and shook his head, which proved a mistake; the contents shifted abruptly, and his stomach rose in protest at the sudden movement. He barely made it to the chamber pot in time and, once evacuated, lay numbly on the floor, cheek pressed to the cold boards.

  It wasn’t that he couldn’t get up and go to bed. It was that he couldn’t face the thought of the cold white sheets, the pillows round and smooth, as though Lillie’s head had never dented them, the bed never known the heat of her body.

  Tears ran sideways over the bridge of his nose and dripped on the floor. There was a snuffling noise, and Plonplon came squirming out from under the bed and licked his face, whining anxiously. After a little while, he sat up and, leaning against the side of the bed with the dog in one arm, reached for the decanter of port that the butler had left—by instruction—on the table beside it.

  THE SMELL WAS appalling. Rakoczy had wrapped a woolen comforter about his lower face, but the odor seeped in, putrid and cloying, clinging to the back of the throat, so that even breathing through the mouth didn’t preserve you from the stench. He breathed as shallowly as he could, though, picking his way carefully past the edge of the cemetery by the narrow beam of a dark lantern. The mine lay well beyond it, but the stench carried amazingly when the wind blew from the east.

  The chalk mine had been abandoned for years; it was rumored to be haunted. It was. Rakoczy knew what haunted it. Never religious—he was a philosopher and a natural scientist, a rationalist—he still crossed himself by reflex at the head of the ladder that led down the shaft into those spectral depths.

  At least the rumors of ghosts and earth demons and the walking dead would keep anyone from coming to investigate strange light glowing from the subterranean tunnels of the workings, if it was noticed at all. Though just in case…he opened the burlap bag, still redolent of rats, and fished out a bundle of pitchblende torches and the oiled-silk packet that held several lengths of cloth saturated with salpêtre, salts of potash, blue vitriol, verdigris, butter of antimony, and a few other interesting compounds from his laboratory.

  He found the blue vitriol by smell and wrapped the cloth tightly around the head of one torch, then—whistling under his breath—made three more torches, each impregnated with different salts. He loved this part. It was so simple, and so astonishingly beautiful.

  He paused for a minute to listen, but it was well past dark and the only sounds were those of the night itself—frogs chirping and bellowing in the distant marshes by the cemetery, wind stirring the le
aves of spring. A few hovels sat a half mile away, only one with firelight glowing dully from a smoke hole in the roof. Almost a pity there’s no one but me to see this. He took the little clay firepot from its wrappings and touched a coal to the cloth-wrapped torch. A tiny green flame flickered like a serpent’s tongue, then burst into life in a brilliant globe of ghostly color.

  He grinned at the sight, but there was no time to lose; the torches wouldn’t last forever, and there was work to be done. He tied the bag to his belt and, with the green fire crackling softly in one hand, climbed down into darkness.

  He paused at the bottom, breathing deep. The air was clear, the dust long settled. No one had been down here recently. The dull white walls glowed soft, eerie under the green light, and the passage yawned before him, black as a murderer’s soul. Even knowing the place as well as he did, and with light in his hand, it gave him a qualm to walk into it.

  Is that what death is like? he wondered. A black void that you walked into with no more than a feeble glimmer of faith in your hand? His lips compressed. Well, he’d done that before, if less permanently. But he disliked the way that the notion of death seemed always to be lurking in the back of his mind these days.

  The main tunnel was large, big enough for two men to walk side by side, and the roof was high enough above him that the roughly excavated chalk lay in shadow, barely touched by his torch. The side tunnels were smaller, though. He counted the ones on the left and, despite himself, hurried his step a little as he passed the fourth. That was where it lay, down the side tunnel, a turn to the left, another to the left—was it “widdershins” the English called it, turning against the direction of the sun? He thought that was what Mélisande had called it when she’d brought him here….

  The sixth. His torch had begun to gutter already, and he pulled another from the bag and lit it from the remains of the first, which he dropped on the floor at the entrance to the side tunnel, leaving it to flare and smolder behind him, the smoke catching at his throat. He knew his way, but even so, it was as well to leave landmarks, here in the realm of everlasting night. The mine had deep rooms, one far back that showed strange paintings on the wall, of animals that didn’t exist but had an astonishing vividness, as though they would leap from the wall and stampede down the passages. Sometimes—rarely—he went all the way down into the bowels of the earth, just to look at them.

  The fresh torch burned with the warm light of natural fire, and the white walls took on a rosy glow. So did the painting at the end of the corridor, this one different: a crude but effective rendering of the Annunciation. He didn’t know who had made the paintings that appeared unexpectedly here and there in the mines—most were of religious subjects, a few most emphatically not—but they were useful. There was an iron ring in the wall by the Annunciation, and he set his torch into it.

  Turn back at the Annunciation, then three paces…He stamped his foot, listening for the faint echo, and found it. He’d brought a trowel in his bag, and it was the work of a few moments to uncover the sheet of tin that covered his cache.

  The cache itself was three feet deep and three feet square—he found satisfaction in the knowledge of its perfect cubicity whenever he saw it; any alchemist was by profession a numerologist, as well. It was half full, the contents wrapped in burlap or canvas, not things he wanted to carry openly through the streets. It took some prodding and unwrapping to find the pieces he wanted. Madame Fabienne had driven a hard bargain but a fair one: two hundred ècus a month times four months for the guaranteed exclusive use of Madeleine’s services.

  Four months would surely be enough, he thought, feeling a rounded shape through its wrappings. In fact, he thought one night would be enough, but his man’s pride was restrained by a scientist’s prudence. And even if…there was always some chance of early miscarriage; he wanted to be sure of the child before he undertook any more personal experiments with the space between times. If he knew that something of himself—someone with his peculiar abilities—might be left, just in case this time…

  He could feel it there, somewhere in the smothered dark behind him. He knew he couldn’t hear it now; it was silent, save on the days of solstice and equinox or when you actually walked into it…but he felt the sound of it in his bones, and it made his hands tremble on the wrappings.

  The gleam of silver, of gold. He chose two gold snuffboxes, a filigreed necklace, and—with some hesitation—a small silver salver. Why did the void not affect metal? he wondered for the thousandth time. In fact, carrying gold or silver eased the passage—or at least he thought so. Mélisande had told him it did. But jewels were always destroyed by the passage, though they gave the most control and protection.

  That made some sense; everyone knew that gemstones had a specific vibration that corresponded to the heavenly spheres, and the spheres themselves of course affected the earth: As above, so below. He still had no idea exactly how the vibrations should affect the space, the portal…it. But thinking about it gave him a need to touch them, to reassure himself, and he moved wrapped bundles out of the way, digging down to the left-hand corner of the wood-lined cache, where pressing on a particular nailhead caused one of the boards to loosen and turn sideways, rotating smoothly on spindles. He reached into the dark space thus revealed and found the small washleather bag, feeling his sense of unease dissipate at once when he touched it.

  He opened it and poured the contents into his palm, glittering and sparking in the dark hollow of his hand. Reds and blues and greens, the brilliant white of diamonds, the lavender and violet of amethyst, and the golden glow of topaz and citrine. Enough?

  Enough to travel back, certainly. Enough to steer himself with some accuracy, to choose how far he went. But enough to go forward?

  He weighed the glittering handful for a moment, then poured them carefully back. Not yet. But he had time to find more; he wasn’t going anywhere for at least four months. Not until he was sure that Madeleine was well and truly with child.

  “JOAN.” MICHAEL PUT his hand on her arm, keeping her from leaping out of the carriage. “Ye’re sure, now? I mean, if ye didna feel quite ready, ye’re welcome to stay at my house until—”

  “I’m ready.” She didn’t look at him, and her face was pale as a slab of lard. “Let me go, please.”

  He reluctantly let go of her arm but insisted upon getting down with her and ringing the bell at the gate, stating their business to the portress. All the time, though, he could feel her shaking, quivering like a blancmange. Was it fear, though, or just understandable nerves? He’d feel a bit cattywampus himself, he thought with sympathy, were he making such a shift, beginning a new life so different from what had gone before.

  The portress went away to fetch the mistress of postulants, leaving them in the little enclosure by the gatehouse. From here, he could see across a sunny courtyard with a cloister walk on the far side and what looked like extensive kitchen gardens to the right. To the left was the looming bulk of the hospital run by the order and, beyond that, the other buildings that belonged to the convent. It was a beautiful place, he thought—and hoped the sight of it would settle her fears.

  She made an inarticulate noise, and he glanced at her, alarmed to see what looked like tears slicking her cheeks.

  “Joan,” he said more quietly, and handed her his fresh handkerchief. “Dinna be afraid. If ye need me, send for me, anytime; I’ll come. And I meant it about the letters.”

  He would have said more, but just then the portress reappeared with Sister Eustacia, the postulant mistress, who greeted Joan with a kind motherliness that seemed to comfort her, for the girl sniffed and straightened herself and, reaching into her pocket, pulled out a little folded square, obviously kept with care through her travels.

  “J’ai une lettre,” she said in halting French. “Pour Madame le…pour…Reverend Mother?” she said in a small voice. “Mother Hildegarde?”

  “Oui?” Sister Eustacia took the note with the same care with which it was proffered.

/>   “It’s from…her,” Joan said to Michael, having plainly run out of French. She still wouldn’t look at him. “Da’s…er…wife. You know. Claire.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Michael blurted, making both the portress and the postulant mistress stare reprovingly at him.

  “She said she was a friend of Mother Hildegarde. And if she was still alive…” She stole a look at Sister Eustacia, who appeared to have followed this.

  “Oh, Mother Hildegarde is certainly alive,” she assured Joan, in English. “And I’m sure she will be most interested to speak with you.” She tucked the note into her own capacious pocket and held out a hand. “Now, my dear child, if you are quite ready…”

  “Je suis prêt,” Joan said, shaky but dignified. And so Joan MacKimmie of Balriggan passed through the gates of the Convent of Angels, still clutching Michael Murray’s clean handkerchief and smelling strongly of his dead wife’s scented soap.

  MICHAEL HAD DISMISSED his carriage and wandered restlessly about the city after leaving Joan at the convent, not wanting to go home. He hoped they would be good to her, hoped that she’d made the right decision.

  Of course, he comforted himself, she wouldn’t actually be a nun for some time. He didn’t know quite how long it took, from entering as a postulant to becoming a novice to taking the final vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but at least a few years. There would be time for her to be sure. And at least she was in a place of safety; the look of terror and distress on her face as she’d shot through the gates of the convent still haunted him. He strolled toward the river, where the evening light glowed on the water like a bronze mirror. The deckhands were tired and the day’s shouting had died away. In this light, the reflections of the boats gliding homeward seemed more substantial than the boats themselves.

  He’d been surprised at the letter and wondered whether that had anything to do with Joan’s distress. He’d had no notion that his uncle’s wife had anything to do with le Couvent des Anges—though now he cast his mind back, he did recall Jared mentioning that Uncle Jamie had worked in Paris in the wine business for a short time, back before the Rising. He supposed Claire might have met Mother Hildegarde then…but it was all before he was born.