Outlander 03 - Voyager

curve of the petal with a finger, as though it were a baby’s cheek.

“I thought I wouldn’t cry,” I said a little later.

I felt the weight of Mother Hildegarde’s hand on my head.

“Le Bon Dieu orders things as He thinks best,” she said softly. “But He seldom tells us why.”

I took a deep breath and wiped my cheeks with a corner of my cloak. “It was a long time ago, though.” I rose slowly to my feet and turned to find Mother Hildegarde watching me with an expression of deep sympathy and interest.

“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is—in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as it was when it was born, when it learned to walk, as it was at any age—at any time, even when the child is fully grown and a parent itself.”

“Especially when they’re asleep,” I said, looking down again at the little white stone. “You can always see the baby then.”

“Ah.” Mother nodded, satisfied. “I thought you had had more children; you have the look, somehow.”

“One more.” I glanced at her. “And how do you know so much about mothers and children?”

The small black eyes shone shrewdly under heavy brow ridges whose sparse hairs had gone quite white.

“The old require very little sleep,” she said, with a deprecatory shrug. “I walk the wards at night, sometimes. The patients talk to me.”

She had shrunk somewhat with advancing age, and the wide shoulders were slightly bowed, thin as a wire hanger beneath the black serge of her habit. Even so, she was still taller than I, and towered over most of the nuns, more scarecrow-like, but imposing as ever. She carried a walking stick but strode erect, firm of tread and with the same piercing eye, using the stick more frequently to prod idlers or direct underlings than to lean on.

I blew my nose and we turned back along the path to the convent. As we walked slowly back, I noticed other small stones set here and there among the larger ones.

“Are those all children?” I asked, a little surprised.

“The children of the nuns,” she said matter-of-factly. I gaped at her in astonishment, and she shrugged, elegant and wry as always.

“It happens,” she said. She walked a few steps farther, then added, “Not often, of course.” She gestured with her stick around the confines of the cemetery.

“This place is reserved for the sisters, a few benefactors of the Hopital—and those they love.”

“The sisters or the benefactors?”

“The sisters. Here, you lump!”

Mother Hildegarde paused in her progress, spotting an orderly leaning idly against the church wall, smoking a pipe. As she berated him in the elegantly vicious Court French of her girlhood, I stood back, looking around the tiny cemetery.

Against the far wall, but still in consecrated ground, was a row of small stone tablets, each with a single name, “Bouton.” Below each name was a Roman numeral, I through XV. Mother Hildegarde’s beloved dogs. I glanced at her current companion, the sixteenth holder of that name. This one was coal-black, and curly as a Persian lamb. He sat bolt upright at her feet, round eyes fixed on the delinquent orderly, a silent echo of Mother Hildegarde’s outspoken disapproval.

The sisters, and those they love.

Mother Hildegarde came back, her fierce expression altering at once to the smile that transformed her strong gargoyle features into beauty.

“I am so pleased that you have come again, ma chere,” she said. “Come inside; I shall find things that may be useful to you on your journey.” Tucking the stick in the crook of her arm, she instead took my forearm for support, grasping it with a warm bony hand whose skin had grown paperthin. I had the odd feeling that it was not I who supported her, but the other way around.

As we turned into the small yew alley that led to the entrance to the Hopital, I glanced up at her.

“I hope you won’t think me rude, Mother,” I said hesitantly, “but there is one question I wanted to ask you…”

“Eighty-three,” she replied promptly. She grinned broadly, showing her long yellow horse’s teeth. “Everyone wants to know,” she said complacently. She looked back over her shoulder toward the tiny graveyard, and lifted one shoulder in a dismissive Gallic shrug.

“Not yet,” she said confidently. “Le Bon Dieu knows how much work there is still to do.”

41

WE SET SAIL

It was a cold, gray day—there is no other kind in Scotland in December—when the Artemis touched at Cape Wrath, on the northwest coast.

I peered out of the tavern window into a solid gray murk that hid the cliffs along the shore. The place was depressingly reminiscent of the landscape near the silkies’ isle, with the smell of dead seaweed strong in the air, and the crashing of waves so loud as to inhibit conversation, even inside the small pothouse by the wharf. Young Ian had been taken nearly a month before. Now it was past Christmas, and here we were, still in Scotland, no more than a few miles from the seals’ island.