No one had known the cabin was there, until Kenny Lindsey had seen the flames, on his way up the river.

"I wouldna ha' seen at all," he said, for perhaps the sixth time. "Save for the dark comin' on. Had it been daylight, I'd never ha' kent it, never." He wiped a trembling hand over his face, unable to take his eyes off the line of bodies that lay at the edge of the forest. "Was it savages, _Mac Dubh_? They're no scalped, but maybe--"

"No." Jamie laid the soot-smeared handkerchief gently back over the staring blue face of a small girl. "None of them are wounded. Surely ye saw as much when ye brought them out?"

Lindsey shook his head, eyes closed, and shivered convulsively. It was just after dawn, and a cold November morning, but the men were all sweating.

"I didna look," he said simply.

My own hands were like ice; as numb and unfeeling as the rubbery flesh of the dead woman I was examining. They had been dead for more than a day; the rigor of death had passed off, leaving them limp and chilled, but the cold weather had preserved them so far from the grosser indignities of putrefaction.

Still, I breathed shallowly; the air was still bitter with the scent of burning. Wisps of steam rose from the charred ruin of the tiny cabin. From the corner of my eye, I saw Roger kick at a nearby log, then bend and pick up something from the ground beneath.

Kenny had pounded on our door long before daylight, summoning us from warm beds. We had come in haste, even knowing that we were far too late to offer aid. Some of the men from the homesteads on Fraser's Ridge had come, too; Kenny's brother Ewan stood with Fergus and Ronnie Sinclair in a small knot under the trees, talking together in low-voiced Gaelic.

"D'ye ken what did for them, Sassenach?" Jamie squatted beside me, face troubled. "The ones under the trees, that is." He nodded at the corpse in front of me. "I ken what killed this puir woman."

The woman's long skirt stirred in the wind, lifting to show long, slender feet shod in leather clogs. A pair of long hands to match lay still at her sides. She had been tall--though not so tall as Brianna, I thought, and looked automatically for my daughter's bright hair, bobbing among the branches on the far side of the clearing.

I had turned the woman's apron up to cover her head and upper body. Her hands were red, rough-knuckled with work, and with callused palms, but from the firmness of her thighs and the slenderness of her body, I thought she was no more than thirty-- likely much younger. No one could say whether she had been pretty.

I shook my head at his remark.

"I don't think she died of the burning," I said. "See, her legs and feet aren't touched. She must have fallen into the hearth. Her hair caught fire, and it spread to the shoulders of her gown. She must have lain near enough to the wall or the chimney-hood for the flames to touch; that caught, and then the whole bloody place went up."

Jamie nodded slowly, eyes on the dead woman.

"Aye, that makes sense. But what was it killed them, Sassenach? The others are singed a bit, though none are burnt like this. But they must have been dead before the cabin caught alight, for none o' them ran out. Was it a deadly illness, perhaps?"

"I don't think so. Let me look at the others again."

I walked slowly down the row of still bodies with their cloth- covered faces, stooping over each one to peer beneath the makeshift shrouds. There were any number of illnesses that could be quickly fatal in these days--with no antibiotics to hand, and no way of administering fluids save by mouth, a simple case of diarrhea could kill within twenty-four hours. No illness that I knew left such traces on their victims, though.

All the bodies--the woman, a man in his thirties, a much older woman, and three children--had been found inside the walls of the flaming house. Kenny had pulled them out before the roof fell in. All dead before the fire started; all dead virtually at the same time, then, for surely the fire had begun to smolder soon after the woman fell dead on her hearth?

The victims had been laid out neatly under the branches of a giant spruce tree, while the men began to dig a grave nearby. Brianna stood by the little girl, her head bent. I came to kneel by the small body, and she knelt down across from me.

"What was it?" she asked quietly. "Poison?"

I glanced up at her in surprise.

"I think so. What gave you that idea?"

She nodded at the blue-tinged face below us. She had tried to close the eyes, but they bulged beneath the lids, giving the little girl a look of startled horror. The small, blunt features were twisted in a rictus of agony, and there were traces of vomit in the corners of the mouth.

"Girl Scout handbook," Brianna said. Her mouth twitched, and she looked away from the body, holding out her open hand. "'Never eat any strange mushroom,'" she quoted. "'There are many poisonous varieties, and distinguishing one from another is a job for an expert.' Roger found these, growing in a ring by that log over there."

Moist, fleshy caps, a pale brown with white warty spots, the open gills and slender stems so pale as to look almost phosphorescent in the spruce-shadows. They had a pleasant, earthy look to them that belied their deadliness.

"Panther toadstools," I said, half to myself, and picked one gingerly from her palm. _Amanita pantherinus_--or that's what they _will_ be called, once somebody gets round to naming them properly. _Pantherinus_, because they kill so swiftly--like a striking cat."

I could see the gooseflesh ripple on Brianna's forearm. She tilted her hand and spilled the rest of the deadly fungus on the ground.

"Who in their right mind would eat toadstools?" she asked, wiping her hand on her skirt with a slight shudder.

"People who didn't know better. People who were hungry," I answered softly. I picked up the little girl's hand, and traced the delicate bones of the forearm. The small belly showed signs of bloat, whether from malnutrition or post-mortem changes I couldn't tell--but the collarbones were sharp as scythe-blades. All of the bodies were thin to the point of emaciation.

It was late in the year; we had had one snowfall already. I looked up, into the deep blue shadows of the hillside above the cabin. A month earlier, and there would have been food in abundance in the forest--for those who could recognize it.

Jamie came and knelt down beside me, a big hand lightly on my back.

"The grave is ready," he said, speaking low, as though he might alarm the child. "Is that what's killed the bairn?" He nodded at the scattered fungi.

"I think so--and the rest of them, too. Have you had a look around? Does anyone know who they were?"

He shook his head.

"Not English; the clothes are wrong. Germans would have gone to High Point, surely; they're clannish souls, and no inclined to settle on their own. These were maybe Dutchmen." He nodded toward the carved wooden clogs on one corpse's feet, cracked and stained with long use. "They had no books; nothing left in the cabin that might tell their name."

"They hadn't been here long." Roger had come; he squatted next to Brianna, nodding toward the smoldering remains of the cabin. A small garden plot had been scratched into the earth nearby, but the few plants showing were no more than half-grown, the tender leaves limp and blackened with frost. There were no sheds, no sign of livestock, no mule or pig.

"New emigrants," Roger said. "Not bondservants; this was a whole family. They weren't used to manual labor, either; the man's hands have blisters and fresh scars, from raising the cabin." His own broad hand rubbed unconsciously over a homespun knee; his palms were as smoothly callused as Jamie's now, but he had once been a tender-skinned scholar; he remembered the pain of his seasoning.

"I wonder if they left people behind--in Europe," Brianna murmured. She smoothed blonde hair off the little girl's forehead, and laid the kerchief back over her face. "They'll never know what happened to them."

"No." Jamie stood abruptly. "They do say that God protects fools--but I think even the Almighty will lose patience now and then." He turned away, motioning to Lindsay and Sinclair.

The dead were laid in one grave. Brianna and I fetched rocks from the slope while the burying went on; we would build a cairn, in the ancient Scottish way, to mark the place and keep wild beasts from the bodies.

A cold wind had sprung up in the wake of dawn; the apron fluttered away from the woman's face as they lifted her. Sinclair gave a strangled cry of shock, and nearly dropped her.

She had neither face nor hair anymore; the slender waist narrowed abruptly into charred ruin. The flesh of her head had burnt away completely, leaving an oddly tiny, blackened skull, from which her teeth grinned in disconcerting levity.

They lowered her hastily into the shallow grave, her children beside her, then stood, white-faced and shaken, as Jamie spoke the prayers for the dead above the new-made mound. I saw Roger stand close beside Brianna, his arm protectively about her waist. A small shudder went through her, that I thought had nothing to do with the cold.

Jamie lifted his head, and I met his eyes. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking, as I was, of the future. Of a small item that would appear in the pages of the _Wilmington Gazette_, some six years hence.

_"It is with grief that the news is received of the deaths by fire of James MacKenzie Fraser and his wife, Claire Fraser, in a conflagration that destroyed their house in the settlement of Fraser's Ridge, on the night of January 11 last. Mr. Fraser, a nephew of the late Hector Cameron of River Run plantation, was born at Broch Tuarach in Scotland. He was widely known in the Colony and deeply respected; he leaves no surviving children._"

It had been easy, so far, not to think too much of it. So far in the future, and surely not an unchangeable future--after all, forewarned was forearmed...wasn't it?

I glanced at the shallow cairn, and a shudder passed through me as well. I stepped closer to Jamie, and put my hand on his arm. He covered my hand with his, and squeezed tight in reassurance. No, he said to me silently. No, I will not let it happen.

As we left the desolate clearing, though, I could not free my mind of one vivid image. Not the burnt cabin, the pitiful bodies, the pathetic dead garden. The image that haunted me was one I had seem some years before--a gravestone in the ruins of Beauly Priory, high in the Scottish Highlands.

It was the tomb of a noble lady, her name surmounted by the carving of a grinning skull. Beneath was her motto:

_Hodie mihi cras tibi - Sic transit gloria mundi._ "My turn today--yours tomorrow. Thus passes the glory of the world." Copyright 1997 Diana Gabaldon

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page