Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

by Diana Gabaldon

  “Jesus Christ, where are we?” he gasped. He had to set her down but tried to support her with one arm.

  “Malcolm,” she gasped. “Malcolm,” and pointed to a crooked passageway that curved away to the right.

  It was like the sort of nightmare that involves endless repetition of something insane, he thought. The last such nightmare hadn’t smelled like a dead octopus, though…

  “Aquí!” She squirmed suddenly and he lost his grip on her. She staggered and crashed into a door that looked as though it had been left outdoors for a century or two. Still pretty solid, he thought dimly.

  “God, do you mean I have to break it down?”

  She ignored him, swaying as she fumbled in her skirts. Her face, her hair, and her shoulder were drenched with blood, and her hands shook so hard that she dropped the keys as soon as she found them. They landed in a clash of metal, drops of blood blooming on the stones around them.

  John fumbled in his sleeve for a handkerchief, in some hope of stopping the bleeding, and there ensued an awkward struggle, him trying to tie the cloth around her head, she bending and snatching vainly at the keys, falling every time she bent over.

  Grey finally said something in German and grabbed the keys himself. He thrust the handkerchief into Inocencia’s twitching fingers and stabbed at the door.

  “Quién es?” said Malcolm’s voice, quite loudly, near his ear.

  “Es mi, querida!” Inocencia collapsed against the door, palms plastered to the wood, and left streaks of blood as she slid slowly down it. Grey dropped the keys, fell to his knees, and grabbed his handkerchief out of her limp hand. He found Malcolm’s wig in his pocket, wadded it, and bound it as tightly to her head as he could. There was a long slash through her scalp, and her left ear was hanging by a thread, but he thought dimly that it wasn’t that bad—if she didn’t bleed to death.

  She was gray as a storm cloud and gasping heavily, but her eyes were open, fixed on the door.

  Malcolm had been shouting for the last few minutes, pounding on the door ’til it shook. Grey stood up and kicked it several times. The pounding and shouting stopped for a moment.

  “Malcolm?” Grey said, bending to look for the keys. “Bloody get dressed. We’re leaving as soon as I get this damn door open.”

  BY THE TIME they reached the main level of the fortress, most of the noise above had ceased. Grey could still hear shouts and the sounds of an occasional scuffle;—there was a lot of muffled Spanish that had an official tone—the officers of the fortress marshaling men, assessing damage, starting the clearing up.

  He’d told the slaves: “Spike the guns, and run. Don’t wait about for your companions or for anything else. Make your way into the city and hide. When you think it’s safe, go to Cojimar, where the British ships are. Ask for General Stanley or the admiral. Tell them my name.”

  He’d given a letter of explanation, and the document signed by the slaves, to Tom Byrd, with instructions to find General Stanley. He hoped Tom had made it to the siege lines without being shot—but he’d sent Tom because of his face. No one could doubt he was an Englishman, at whatever distance.

  The night outside was quiet. He breathed the clean sea air and felt the touch of it soft on his face. Then he touched Malcolm’s arm—Malcolm was carrying the girl—and pointed toward Calle Yoenis.

  “We’ll go to my mother’s house,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything when we get there.”

  SOME LITTLE TIME later, too restless to sit, he limped from the sala into the garden and leaned against a flowering quince tree. His ears still rang with the sounds of steel, and he closed his eyes, seeking silence.

  Maricela had assured him that Inocencia would live. She herself had stitched the ear back on and applied a pulpa of several herbs whose names Grey didn’t recognize. Malcolm was still with her. Grey hadn’t had the strength to tell Malcolm that he was now a widower rather than an adulterer. The night would vanish, all too soon, but for the moment, time had no meaning. Nothing need be done.

  He couldn’t know the extent of the slaves’ success—but they had been successful. Even in the brief frantic interstices of the fighting, he’d seen a dozen guns spiked, and heard the ring of hammers above as he’d half-fallen down the stairs with Inocencia. As he and Malcolm had made their way out of the fortress with her, he’d heard Spanish shouting from the rooftop, furious and thick with curses.

  He stood among the fragrant bushes for what seemed a long time, feeling his heart beat, content simply to be breathing. He stirred, though, at the sounds of the garden gate opening and low voices.

  “Tom?” he came out from under his sheltering quince, to find both Tom and Rodrigo—both of whom were amazingly, if flatteringly, delighted to see him.

  “We thought you was done for, sure, me lord,” Tom said for the third or fourth time, following Grey into the kitchen. “You sure you’re all right, are you?”

  The tone of accusing doubt in this question was so familiar that Grey felt tears come to his eyes. He blinked them away, though, assured Tom that he was somewhat banged about but essentially undamaged.

  “Gracias a Dios,” Rodrigo said, with such heartfelt sincerity that Grey looked at him in surprise. He said something else in Spanish that Grey didn’t understand; John shook his head, then stopped abruptly, wincing.

  Tom looked at Rodrigo, who made a small helpless gesture at his inability to be understood and nodded at Tom, who took a deep breath and looked at his employer searchingly.

  “What?” Grey said, somewhat disturbed by their solemn attitudes.

  “Well, me lord,” Tom squared his shoulders, “it’s just what Rodrigo told me this afternoon—after you left.” He glanced at Rodrigo, who nodded again.

  “See, he’s been a-wanting to tell you, ever since you come back from the plantations, but he didn’t want his wife or Inocencia to hear it. But he got Jacinto to come translate for him, so he could tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” Grey was discovering the stirrings of hunger and was rummaging through the larder, pulling out sausages and cheese and a jar of some kind of fruit preserve.

  “Well, he told me about what happened when you talked to the slaves in the tobacco shed and when the one man told him to leave because he’s a zombie.” Tom looked protectively at Rodrigo; he’d quite lost any sense of fear about it.

  “So he didn’t want to stay too near—he says sometimes people gets very upset about him—and he walked down toward the plantation house.”

  Approaching the house, Rodrigo had come upon the woman Alejandra—Inocencia’s cousin, the one who had revealed the slave revolt, in hopes that Inocencia’s English lover might be able to do something before anything dreadful could happen.

  “She was worried, you could see, Rodrigo says, and talked a lot about her lover—that’s Hamid, what he says you met—and how she didn’t want him or the others to die, and they would if…well, anyway, they got summat close to the big hacienda, and she stopped sudden.”

  Alejandra had stood there in the darkness, her white dress seeming to float in the air beside Rodrigo like a ghost. He stood with her, quiet, waiting to see what she would say next. But she hadn’t spoken, only stood frozen for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t, the night wind rising and stirring her skirts.

  “Then she took his arm and said they should go back, and they did. But…” Tom coughed, his round face troubled, and looked at Rodrigo again.

  “Rodrigo said Azeel told him on the way back to Havana what happened in the shed. What you said to that man, Cano, and what he said to you—about the people what owned the plantation.”

  “Yes?” Grey paused in the act of buttering a chunk of bread.

  Rodrigo said something quiet, and Tom nodded.

  “He said something didn’t seem right while they were looking at the house. There were servants going in and out, but it just didn’t feel right to him. And when he heard what this Cano said to you—”

  “No los mataremos,” Grey said
, suddenly uneasy. “ ‘We will not kill them’?”

  Rodrigo nodded, and Tom cleared his throat.

  “You can’t kill somebody what’s already dead, can you, me lord?”

  “Already…no. No, you can’t mean that the slaves had already…No.” But a worm of doubt was taking up residence in his stomach, and he put the bread down.

  “The…wind,” Rodrigo said, with his usual agonizing pause to find an English word. “Muerto.”

  He lifted his hand, a beautiful, slender hand, and drew his knuckles gently beneath his nose.

  “I…know…the smell…of death.”

  COULD IT BE TRUE? Grey was too exhausted to feel more than a distant sense of cold horror at the notion, but he couldn’t dismiss it. Cano had not struck him as a patient man. He could easily imagine that the slave had grown frustrated when Malcolm didn’t appear soon enough and had decided to carry out his original plan. But then when Grey did come—Christ, he must have arrived on the heels of the…the massacre…

  He remembered his sight of the hacienda: lights burning inside but so quiet. No sense of movement within; only the silent passage of the house-slaves outside. And the stink of anger in the tobacco shed. He shuddered.

  He took his leave of Tom and Rodrigo but, too tired and shocked to sleep, then sought refuge in the sala, which seemed always to have light. One of the kitchen maids, undoubtedly roused by Tom, came in with a pitcher of wine and a plate of cheese; she smiled sleepily at him, murmured, “Buenas noches, señor,” and stumbled back toward her bed.

  He couldn’t eat, or even sit down, and after a moment’s hesitation went out again, into the deserted patio. He stood there for some time, looking up into the black velvet sky. What time was it? The moon had set and surely dawn could not be far off, but there was no trace of light save the distant stars.

  What should he do? Was there anything he could do? He thought not. There was no way of telling whether Rodrigo was right—and even if he was (a small, cold feeling at the back of Grey’s neck was inclined to believe it)…there was nothing to be done, no one to tell who could investigate, let alone try to find the murderers, if murderers they were.

  The city lay suspended between the Spanish and the British invaders; there was no telling when the siege would be successful—though he thought it would. The spiking of El Morro’s guns would help, but the navy must be informed, so as to take advantage of it.

  Come dawn, he would try to leave the city with his mother and the children and his servants. He thought it could be managed easily enough; he had brought as much gold from Jamaica as he could, and there was more than enough left to bribe their way past the guard at the city gate.

  What then? Exhausted as he was, he wasn’t even thinking, just watching dimly as the future unrolled in small, disjointed pictures: a carriage for his mother and the children and Azeel, himself on the stubborn white mule, two more animals for Tom and Rodrigo.

  The slaves’ contract…if any of them had survived…freedom…the general could see to that…

  Malcolm and the girl…he wondered dimly for a moment about Inocencia; why had Cano tried to kill her…?

  Because she saw him try to kill you, fathead, some dim, dispassionate watcher in his skull observed. And he had to kill you, for fear you’d find out what they’d done at Hacienda Mendez…

  Freedom…even if they’d?…but Cano was dead, and Grey would never know who was guilty of what.

  “Not my place…” he murmured and shut his eyes.

  His hand touched the breast of his shirt and found it stiff with dried blood. He’d left his uniform coat in the kitchen…perhaps one of the women could clean it. He’d need to wear it again, to approach the British lines in Cojimar…Cojimar…a brief vision of white graveled sand, sunlight, fishing boats…the tiny white stone fort, like a doll’s house…find General Stanley.

  Thought of the general drew his fragmented thoughts together, a magnet in a scatter of loose iron filings. Someone to depend on…a man to share the burden…he wanted that, above all things.

  “Oh, God,” he whispered, and moths touched his face, gentle in the dark.

  HE WAS GROWING COLD. He went back inside to the sala and found his mother sitting there. She had taken the manuscript from the secretaire; it sat on the small table beside her, her hand resting on it and a distant look in her eyes. He didn’t think she’d noticed him come in.

  “Your…manuscript,” John said awkwardly. His mother came back abruptly from wherever she had been, her eyes alert but calm.

  “Oh,” she said. “You read it?”

  “No, no,” he said, embarrassed. “I…I only wondered…why are you writing your memoirs? I mean, that is what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, looking faintly amused. “It would have been quite all right if you’d read it—you may read it whenever you like, in fact, though perhaps it would be better to wait until I’ve finished. If I do.”

  He felt a small sense of relaxation at this. His mother was both honest and blunt by nature, and the older she got the less she cared for anyone’s opinion save her own—but she did have a very deep degree of emotional perception. She was reasonably sure that whatever she’d written wouldn’t embarrass him seriously.

  “Ah,” he said. “I wondered whether perhaps you meant it for publication. Many”—he choked off the words “old people” just in time, replacing them with—“people who’ve led interesting lives choose to, er, share their adventures in print.”

  That made her laugh. It was no more than a low, soft laugh, but nonetheless it brought tears to her eyes, and he thought it was because he’d inadvertently cracked the shell she’d built over the course of the last weeks and let her own feelings bubble back to the surface. The thought made him happy, but he looked down to hide it, pulled a clean handkerchief from his sleeve, and handed it to her without comment.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, and, having dabbed her eyes, shook her head.

  “Persons who have truly interesting lives never write about them, John—or not with an eye to publication, at least. The ability to keep their own counsel is one of the things that makes them interesting and is also what causes other truly interesting people to confide in them.”

  “I assure you, Mother,” he said dryly, “you are undoubtedly the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”

  She snorted briefly and gave him a direct look.

  “I suppose that’s why you haven’t yet married, is it?”

  “I didn’t think a wife needed to be interesting,” he replied, with some honesty. “Most of the ones I know certainly aren’t.”

  “How true,” she said briefly. “Is there any wine in the house, John? I’ve got rather fond of Spanish wine since I’ve been here.”

  “Sangria do you? One of the maids brought me a pitcher of it, but I hadn’t drunk any yet.” He got up and fetched the pitcher—a beautiful smooth stoneware thing the color of mulberries—and brought it with a pair of glasses to the table between their chairs.

  “That will be perfect,” she said, and leaned forward with a sigh, massaging her temples. “Oh, God. I go about all day, feeling that none of it is real, that everything is just as I left it, and then suddenly—” She broke off and dropped her hands, her features drawn with pain and tiredness. “Suddenly it’s real again.”

  She glanced at the secretaire as she said this, and John caught a hint of something in her voice. He poured the wine carefully, not to let the sliced lemons and oranges floating in it fall out into the glasses, and didn’t speak until he’d put the pitcher down and taken his seat again.

  “When you write it down…” he said. “Does that make it—whatever it is—real again? Or does the act of putting it into words make it unreal? You know, something…separate from yourself.” What had happened at El Morro had taken place mere hours before, and yet it seemed like years. But the scent of blood and guns hung about him like a shroud, and his muscles still twitched with the memory of desperate exe
rtion.

  His own words brought back to him the letters he had written now and then. The phantoms, as he thought of them: letters he’d written to Jamie Fraser—honest, conversational, heartfelt, and very real. No less real because he’d burned them all.

  His mother looked at him in surprise, then took a meditative sip of the cool spiced wine.

  “Both,” she said at last. “It’s completely real to me as I write it—and should I go back to read it again later, it’s real again.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “I can live in it,” she said softly. She finished her wine—the glasses were small, the sort of cup called a shot glass because the heavy base made it possible to slam it on the table with a loud report at the conclusion of a toast—and carefully poured more.

  “But when it’s done, and I leave it…” She sipped again, the scent of red wine and oranges softening the smells of travel and sickness in her clothes. “It…seems somehow to separate itself from me. I can set it—whatever it was, whatever it is—aside in my mind then, just as I set aside the page.”

  “How very useful,” John murmured, half to himself, thinking that he must try that. The wine was dissolving his own sense of sorrow and exhaustion—if only temporarily. The room grew peaceful around them, candlelight warm on the plastered walls, the wings of angels.

  “But as to why—” His mother refilled his glass, and hers again.

  “It’s a duty. The book—should it be a book—I’ll have it printed and bound, but privately. It’s for you and the other boys, for the children—for Cromwell and Seraphina,” she added softly, and her lips quivered for an instant.

  “Mother,” he said quietly, and laid his hand on hers. She bent her head and put her free hand on his, and he saw how the tendrils of her hair, still thick, once blond like his own but mostly silver now, escaped from their plait and curled on her neck.

  “A duty,” she said, holding his hand between her own. “The duty of a survivor. Not everyone lives to be old, but if you do, I think you owe it to those who didn’t. To tell the stories of those who shared your journey…for as long as they could.”