A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [109]
“Is he stranger than he might be, Christie?” I heard Jamie ask, his own tone casual.
I glanced through the door in time to see Arch Bug nod toward Jamie, though he didn’t speak, being engaged in a fierce battle with his pipe. However, he raised his right hand and waggled it, displaying the stumps of his two missing fingers.
“Aye,” he said finally, releasing a triumphant puff of white smoke with the word. “He wished to ask me whether it hurt a good deal, when this was done.”
His face wrinkled up like a paper bag, and he wheezed a little—high hilarity for Arch Bug.
“Oh, aye? And what did ye tell him, then, Arch?” Jamie asked, smiling a little.
Arch sucked meditatively on his pipe, now fully cooperative, then pursed his lips and blew a small, perfect ring of smoke.
“Weeel, I said it didna hurt a bit—at the time.” He paused, blue eyes twinkling. “Of course, that may have been because I was laid out cold as a mackerel from the shock of it. When I came round, it stung a bit.” He lifted the hand, looking it over dispassionately, then glanced through the door at me. “Ye didna mean to use an ax on poor old Tom, did ye, ma’am? He says ye’re set to mend his hand next week.”
“Probably not. May I see?” I stepped out on the porch, bending to him, and he let me take the hand, obligingly switching his pipe to the left.
The index and middle finger had been severed cleanly, right at the knuckle. It was a very old injury; so old that it had lost that shocking look common to recent mutilations, where the mind still sees what should be there, and tries vainly for an instant to reconcile reality with expectation. The human body is amazingly plastic, though, and will compensate for missing bits as well as it can; in the case of a maimed hand, the remnant often undergoes a subtle sort of useful deformation, to maximize what function remains.
I felt along the hand carefully, fascinated. The metacarpals of the severed digits were intact, but the surrounding tissues had shrunk and twisted, withdrawing that part of the hand slightly, so that the remaining two fingers and the thumb could make a better opposition; I’d seen old Arch use that hand with perfect grace, holding a cup to drink, or wielding the handle of a spade.
The scars over the finger stumps had flattened and paled, forming a smooth, calloused surface. The remaining finger joints were knobbed with arthritis, and the hand as a whole was so twisted that it really didn’t resemble a hand anymore—and yet it was not at all repulsive. It felt strong and warm in mine, and in fact, was oddly attractive, in the same way that a piece of weathered driftwood is.
“It was done with an ax, you said?” I asked, wondering exactly how he had managed to inflict such an injury on himself, given that he was right-handed. A slippage might have gashed an arm or leg, but to take two fingers of the same hand right off like that . . . Realization dawned and my grasp tightened involuntarily. Oh, no.
“Oh, aye,” he said, and exhaled a plume of smoke. I looked up, straight into his bright blue eyes.
“Who did it?” I asked.
“The Frasers,” he said. He squeezed my hand gently, then withdrew his own and turned it to and fro. He glanced at Jamie.
“Not the Frasers of Lovat,” he assured him. “Bobby Fraser of Glenhelm, and his nephew. Leslie, his name was.”
“Oh? Well, that’s good,” Jamie replied, one eyebrow lifted. “I shouldna like to hear it was close kin of mine.”
Arch chuckled, almost soundlessly. His eyes still gleamed bright in their webs of wrinkled skin, but there was something in that laugh that made me want suddenly to step back a little.
“No, ye wouldna,” he agreed. “Nor me. But this was maybe the year ye would have been born, a Sheaumais, or a bit before. And there are no Frasers at Glenhelm now.”
The hand itself had not troubled me at all, but the imagined vision of how it had got that way was making me a trifle faint. I sat