A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [114]
Jamie looked at him under heavy brows for a moment, then sighed.
“Aye. Wait a moment, then.”
Obviously, there was no further point in argument, and I didn’t bother trying. I took down the bottle of medicinal whisky I kept on the shelf and poured a healthy tot into a cup.
“Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,” I said, thrusting it firmly into his upturned hand. “Our mutual acquaintance, St. Paul. If it’s all right to drink for the sake of a stomach, surely to goodness you can take a drop for the sake of a hand.”
His mouth, grimly compressed in anticipation, opened in surprise. He glanced from the cup to me, then back. He swallowed, nodded, and raised the cup to his lips.
Before he had finished, though, Jamie came back, holding a small, battered green book, which he thrust unceremoniously into Christie’s hand.
Christie looked surprised, but held the book out, squinting to see what it was. HOLY BIBLE was printed on the warped cover, King James Version.
“Ye’ll take help where ye can, I suppose?” Jamie said a little gruffly.
Christie looked at him sharply, then nodded, a very faint smile passing through his beard like a shadow.
“I thank you, sir,” he said. He took his spectacles out of his coat and put them on, then opened the little book with great care and began to thumb through it, evidently looking for a suitable inspiration for undergoing surgery without anesthetic.
I gave Jamie a long look, to which he responded with the faintest of shrugs. It wasn’t merely a Bible. It was the Bible that had once belonged to Alexander MacGregor.
Jamie had come by it as a very young man, when he was imprisoned in Fort William by Captain Jonathan Randall. Flogged once, and awaiting another, frightened and in pain, he had been left in solitary confinement with no company save his thoughts—and this Bible, given to him by the garrison’s surgeon for what comfort it might offer.
Alex MacGregor had been another young Scottish prisoner—one who had died by his own hand, rather than suffer the further attentions of Captain Randall. His name was written inside the book, in a tidy, rather sprawling hand. The little Bible was no stranger to fear and suffering, and if it wasn’t ether, I hoped it might still possess its own power of anodyne.
Christie had found something that suited him. He cleared his throat, straightened himself in the chair, and laid his hand on the towel, palm up, in such a forthright manner that I wondered whether he had settled on the passage in which the Maccabees willingly present their hands and tongues for amputation at the hands of the heathen king.
A peek over his shoulder indicated that he was somewhere in the Psalms, though.
“At your convenience, then, Mistress Fraser,” Christie said politely.
If he wasn’t to be unconscious, I needed a bit of extra preparation. Manly fortitude was all very well, and so was Biblical inspiration—but there are relatively few people capable of sitting motionless while having their hand sliced into, and I didn’t think Thomas Christie was one of them.
I had a plentiful supply of linen strips for bandaging. I rolled back his sleeve, then used a few of the strips to bind his forearm tightly to the little table, with an additional band holding back the clawed fingers from the site of operation.
Though Christie seemed rather shocked at the notion of drinking liquor while reading the Bible, Jamie—and, just possibly, the sight of the waiting scalpels—had convinced him that circumstances justified it. He had consumed a couple of ounces by the time I had him properly secured and his palm thoroughly swabbed with raw alcohol, and was looking significantly more relaxed than he had upon entering the room.
This sense of relaxation disappeared abruptly when I made the first incision.
His breath rushed out in a high-pitched gasp and he arched upward out of the chair, jerking the table across the floor with a screech. I grabbed his wrist in time to prevent his ripping the bandages away, and Jamie seized him by both shoulders, pressing him back into the chair.
“Now then, now