Lord John and the Plague of Zombies by Diana Gabaldon

Author:Diana Gabaldon [Gabaldon, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Extracted
Published: 2011-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

HE HAD NEVER BEEN IN THE PRESENCE OF ANYONE WHO REPELLED HIM SO acutely. He wondered why that was; there was nothing overtly ill-favored or ugly about her. If anything, she was a handsome Scotchwoman of middle age, fair-haired and buxom. And yet the widow Abernathy chilled him, despite the warmth of the air on the terrace where she had chosen to receive him at Rose Hall.

She was not dressed in mourning, he saw, nor did she make any obvious acknowledgment of the recent death of her husband. She wore white muslin, embroidered in blue about the hems and sleeves.

“I understand that I must congratulate you upon your survival, madam,” he said, taking the seat to which she gestured him. It was a somewhat callous thing to say, but she looked hard as nails; he didn’t think it would upset her, and he was right.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning back in her own wicker chair and looking him frankly up and down in a way that he found unsettling. “It was bloody cold in that spring, I’ll tell ye that for nothing. Like to died myself, frozen right through.”

He inclined his head courteously.

“I trust you suffered no lingering ill effects from the experience? Beyond, of course, the lamentable death of your husband,” he hurried to add.

She laughed coarsely.

“Glad to get shot o’ the wicked sod.”

At a loss how to reply to this, Grey coughed and changed the subject.

“I am told, madam, that you have an interest in some of the rituals practiced by slaves.”

Her somewhat bleared green glance sharpened at that.

“Who told you that?”

“Miss Nancy Twelvetrees.” There was no reason to keep the identity of his informant secret, after all.

“Oh, wee Nancy, was it?” She seemed amused by that, and shot him a sideways look. “I expect she liked you, no?”

He couldn’t see what Miss Twelvetrees’s opinion of him might have to do with the matter, and said so, politely. Mrs. Abernathy merely smirked at that, waving a hand.

“Aye, well. What is it ye want to know, then?”

“I want to know how zombies are made.”

Shock wiped the smirk off her face, and she blinked at him stupidly for a moment before picking up her glass and draining it.

“Zombies,” she said, and looked at him with a certain wary interest.

“Why?”

He told her. From careless amusement, her attitude changed, interest sharpening. She made him repeat the story of his encounter with the thing in his room, asking sharp questions regarding its smell, particularly.

“Decayed flesh,” she said. “Ye’d ken what that smells like, would ye?”

It must have been her accent that brought back the battlefield at Culloden, and the stench of burning corpses. He shuddered, unable to stop himself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly. “Why?”

She pursed her lips in thought.

“There are different ways to go about it, aye? One way is to give the afile powder to the person, wait until they drop, and then bury them atop a recent corpse. Ye just spread the earth lightly over them,” she explained, catching his look. “And

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