A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [146]
Still gripping my shoulder, he lifted his knife and pressed the flat of the blade against my lips, jammed the tip of it up my nose, then leaned close enough that I felt the moist warmth of his very repugnant breath on my face.
“The one thing I won’t cut off is your tongue,” he whispered. The knife blade drew slowly out of my nose, down my chin, along the line of my neck, and circled round the curve of my breast. “You take my meaning, do you?”
He waited until I managed a nod, then released me and disappeared into the darkness.
If he meant to unnerve me, he’d managed nicely. I was sweating despite the chill, and still shaking when a tall shadow loomed up beside me, took one of my hands, and pressed something into it.
“My name is Tebbe,” he murmured. “You remember that—Tebbe. Remember I was good to you. Tell your spirits they don’t hurt Tebbe, he was good to you.”
I nodded once more, astonished, and was left again, this time with a lump of bread in my hand. I ate it hastily, observing that while very stale, it had originally been good dark rye bread, of the sort the German women of Salem made. Had the men attacked some house near there, or merely bought the bread?
A horse’s saddle had been flung down on the ground near me; a canteen hung from the pommel, and I sank down on my knees to drink from it. The bread and the water—tasting of canvas and wood—tasted better than anything I’d eaten in a long while. I’d noticed before that standing very close to death improves the appetite remarkably. Still, I did hope for something more elaborate as a last meal.
Hodgepile returned a few minutes later, with rope. He didn’t bother with further threats, evidently feeling that he’d made his point. He merely tied me hand and foot, and pushed me down on the ground. No one spoke to me, but someone, with a kindly impulse, threw a blanket over me.
The camp settled quickly. No fire was lit, and so no supper was cooked; the men presumably refreshed themselves in the same makeshift way I had, then scattered into the wood to seek their rest, leaving the horses tethered a little way off.
I waited until the comings and goings died down, then took the blanket in my teeth and wriggled carefully away from the spot where I had been placed, making my way inchworm fashion to another tree, a dozen yards away.
I had no thought of escape in doing this; but if one of the bandits in favor of disposing of me should think to take advantage of the darkness in order to achieve their aims, I didn’t mean to be lying there like a staked goat. With luck, if anyone came skulking round the spot where I’d been, I would have enough warning to scream for help.
I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jamie would come. My job was to survive until he did.
Panting, sweating, covered with crumbled leaves and with my stockings in rags, I curled up under a big hornbeam, and burrowed back under the blanket. Thus concealed, I had a try at undoing the knots in the rope around my wrists with my teeth. Hodgepile had tied them, though, and had done so with military thoroughness. Short of gnawing gopherlike through the ropes themselves, I was going nowhere.
Military. It was that thought that recalled suddenly to me who he was, and where I had seen him before. Arvin Hodgepile! He had been the clerk at the Crown’s warehouse in Cross Creek. I had met him briefly, three years before, when Jamie and I brought the body of a murdered girl to the sergeant of the garrison there.
Sergeant Murchison was dead—and I’d thought Hodgepile was, as well, killed in the conflagration that had destroyed the warehouse and its contents. So, a deserter, then. Either he had had time to escape the warehouse before it went up in flames, or had simply not been there at the time. In either case, he’d been clever enough to realize that he could take this opportunity to disappear from His Majesty’s army, leaving his death to be assumed.
What he had been doing since then was clear, too. Wandering the countryside, stealing, robbing, and killing—and collecting a