New Year Excerpt B from An Echo in the Bone
Copyright © 2007 Diana Gabaldon, An Echo in the Bone. All rights reserved.

“Jem?” she called. “Mandy?”

Total silence. She stepped out of the back kitchen, listening for the usual thumps, bangings, and screeches from above, but there was not the slightest sound of trampling feet, toppling blocks, or the high-pitched voices of sibling warfare.

“Jem!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

No reply. The last time this had happened, two days before, she’d discovered her alarm clock in the bottom of the bathtub, neatly disassembled into its component parts, and both children at the far end of the garden, glowing with unnatural innocence.

“I didn’t do it!” Jem had declared virtuously, hauled into the house and faced with the evidence. “And Mandy’s too little.”

“Too widdle,” Mandy had agreed, nodding her mop of black curls so ferociously as to obscure her face.

“Well, I don’t think Daddy did it,” Bree said, raising a stern brow. “And I’m sure it wasn’t Mrs. MacDonald. Which doesn’t leave very many suspects, does it?”

“Shussspects, Shussspects,” Mandy said happily, enchanted by the new word.

Jem shook his head in resigned fashion, viewing the scattered gears and dismembered hands.

“We must have got piskies, Mama.”

“Pishkies, pishkies,” Mandy chirped, pulling her skirt up over her head and yanking at her frilly underpants. “Needa go pishkie, Mama!”

In the midst of the urgency occasioned by this statement, Jem had faded artfully, not to be seen again until dinner, by which time the affair of the alarm clock had been superceded by the usual fierce rush of daily events, not to be recalled until bedtime, when Roger remarked the absence of the alarm clock.

“Jem doesn’t usually lie,” Roger had said thoughtfully, having been shown the small pottery bowl now containing the clock’s remains.

Bree, brushing out her hair for bed, gave him a jaundiced look.

“Oh, you think we have pixies, too?”

“Piskies,” he said absently, stirring the small pile of gears in the bowl with a finger.

“What? You mean they really are called ‘piskies’ here? I thought Jem was just mispronouncing it.”

“Well, no--“pisky” is Cornish; they’re called pixies in other parts of the West Country, though.”

“What are they called in Scotland?”

“We haven’t really got any. Scotland’s got its fair share of the faery-folk,” he said, scooping up a handful of clock innards and letting them tinkle musically back into the bowl. “But Scots tend toward the grimmer manifestations of the supernatural--water horses, ban-sidhe, blue hags, and the Nuckelavee, aye? Piskies are a wee bit frivolous for Scotland. We have got brownies, mind,” he added, taking the brush from her hand, “but they’re more of a household help, not mischief-makers like piskies. Can ye put the clock back together?”

“Sure--if the piskies didn’t lose any of the parts. What on earth is a Nuckelavee?”

“Nothing ye want to hear about just before bed,” he assured her. And bending, breathed very softly on her neck, just below the earlobe.

The faint tingle engendered by the memory of what had happened after that momentarily overlaid her suspicions of what the children might be up to, but the sensation faded, to be replaced by increasing worry.

There was no sign of either Jem or Mandy anywhere in the house. Roger was in his study; she could hear him talking to someone, but the sound of the conversation was adult. Mrs. MacDonald didn’t come on Thursdays, and the kitchen...at first glance, it seemed undisturbed, but she was familiar with Jem’s methods.

Sure enough, the packet of chocolate biscuits was missing, as was a bottle of lemon-squash, though everything else in the cupboard was in perfect order--and the cupboard was six feet off the ground. Jem showed great promise as a cat-burglar, she thought. At least he’d have a career if he got chucked out of school for good one of these days after telling his classmates something especially picturesque he’d brought back from the eighteenth century.

The missing food allayed her uneasiness. If they’d taken a picnic, they were outside, and while they might be anywhere within a half-mile of the house--Mandy couldn’t walk further than that--chances were they wouldn’t have gone far before sitting down to eat biscuits.

It was a beautiful late-spring day, and despite the need to track down her miscreants, she was glad to be out in the sun and breeze. Socks could wait. And so could weeding and planting the vegetable beds. And speaking to the plumber about the geyser in the upstairs bath. And...

“It doesna matter how many things ye do on a farm, there’s always more than ye can do. A wonder the place doesna rise up about my ears and swallow me, like Jonah and the whale.”

For an instant, she heard her father’s voice, full of exasperated resignation at encountering another unexpected chore. She glanced round at him, smiling, then stopped, realization and longing sweeping over her in waves.

“Oh, Da,” she said softly. She walked on, more slowly, suddenly seeing not the albatross of a big, semi-decayed house, but the living organism that was Lallybroch, and all those of her blood who had been part of it--who still were.

The Frasers and Murrays who had put their own sweat and blood and tears into its buildings and soil, woven their lives into its land. He, uncle Ian, aunt Jenny--the swarm of cousins she had known so briefly. Young Ian. All of them dead now...but curiously enough, not gone.

“Not gone at all,” she said aloud, and found comfort in the words. She’d reached the back gate of the kailyard and paused, glancing up the hill toward the ancient broch that gave the place its name; the burying-ground was up on that same hill, most of its stones so weathered that the names and their dates were indecipherable, the stones themselves mostly obliterated by creeping gorse and sweet broom. And amidst the splashes of black-green and brilliant yellow were two small, moving splotches of red and blue.