Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Voyager > Status Update

‘boy in the portrait was perhaps nine or ten, with a childish tenderness still lingering about his face, and his hair was a soft chestnut brown, not red. But the slanted blue eyes looked out boldly over a straight nose a fraction of an inch too long, and the high Viking cheekbones pressed tight against smooth skin. The tilt of the head held the same confident carriage as that of the man who had given him that face.’

‘I saw his point; Laoghaire was not going to be pleased at hearing that her eldest daughter had eloped with a one-handed ex-pickpocket twice her age. Her maternal feelings were unlikely to be assuaged by hearing that the marriage had been performed in the middle of the night on a West Indian beach by a disgraced - if not actually defrocked - priest, witnessed by twenty-five seamen’

‘Was this what the goat-woman had meant? That Claire had swum ashore on this island? He felt a welling of hope that was as refreshing to his heart as the water had been to his parched throat. Claire was stubborn, reckless, and had a great deal more courage than was safe for a woman, but she was by no means such a fool as to fall off a man-of-war by accident.’

‘If not for the headache, it could be simple gastroenteritis - but not with this many men stricken. Something very contagious indeed, and I was fairly sure what. Not malaria, coming from Europe to the Caribbean. Typhus was a possibility; carried by the common body louse, it was prone to rapid spread in close quarters like these, and the symptoms were similar to those I saw around me‘

“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.”

‘He was interrupted by a sudden bang we the door flew open and rebounded from the wall. Startled, we turned to look. In the doorway stood a young girl I had never seen before. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, with long flaxen hair and big blue eyes. The eyes were somewhat bigger than normal, and filled with an expression of horrified shock...
“Daddy!” she said, in tones of total outrage. “Who is that woman?”’

‘“Some o’ the auld woman at Lallybroch say ye were a wise woman - a white lady, or maybe even a fairy. When Uncle Jamie came home from Culloden without ye, they said as how ye’d maybe gone back to the fairies, where ye maybe came from. Is that true? D’ye live in a dun?”
...”She escaped to France after Culloden,” Ian broke in suddenly, with great firmness.’

“I’ve seen ye so many times,” he said, his voice whispering warm in my ear. “You’ve come to me so often. When I dreamed sometimes. When I lay in fever. When I was so afraid and so lonely I knew I must die. When I needed you, I would always see ye, smiling, with your hair curling up about your face. But ye never spoke. And ye never touched me.”
“I can touch you now.”

‘If he had no true freedom, he did at least have air, and light, space to stretch his limbs, and the sight of mountains and the lovely horses that Dunsany bred. The other grooms and servants were understandably suspicious of him, but inclined to leave him alone, out of respect for his size and forbidding countenance. It was a lonely life‘

‘His knees gave way, and he realised dimly that he was about to faint. His vision darkened into reddish black, shot with stars and streaks of light - but not even the encroaching dark wild blot out the final sight of Fergus’s hand, that small and deft and clever pickpocket’s hand, lying still in the mud of the track, palm turned upward in supplication.’