A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [185]
“Did he happen to mention why he thinks I ought not to visit Mr. Brown?” I asked calmly, under the circumstances.
Both men looked surprised, then exchanged another look, this one longer.
“No, milady,” Fergus said, his voice carefully neutral.
There was a brief silence, during which both of them seemed to be considering. Then Fergus glanced at Ian, deferring to him with a shrug.
“Well, d’ye see, Auntie,” Ian said carefully, “we do mean to question the fellow.”
“And we will have answers,” Fergus said, eyes on the spoon with which he was stirring his coffee.
“And when Uncle Jamie is satisfied that he has told us what he can . . .”
Ian had laid his newly sharpened knife on the table beside his plate. He picked it up, and thoughtfully drew it down the length of a cold sausage, which promptly split open, with an aromatic burst of sage and garlic. He looked up then, and met my eyes directly. And I realized that while I might still be me—Ian was no longer the boy he used to be. Not at all.
“You’ll kill him, then?” I said, my lips feeling numb in spite of the hot coffee.
“Oh, yes,” Fergus said very softly. “I expect that we shall.” He met my eyes now, too. There was a bleak, grim look about him, and his deep-set eyes were hard as stone.
“He—it—I mean . . . it wasn’t him,” I said. “It couldn’t have been. He’d already broken his leg when—” I didn’t seem to have enough air to finish my sentences. “And Marsali. It wasn’t—I don’t think he . . .”
Something behind Ian’s eyes changed, as he grasped my meaning. His lips pressed tight for a moment, and he nodded.
“As well for him, then,” he said shortly.
“As well,” Fergus echoed, “but I think it will not matter in the end. We killed the others—why should he live?” He pushed back from the table, leaving his coffee undrunk. “I think I will go, cousin.”
“Aye? I’ll come too, then.” Ian shoved his plate away, nodding to me. “Will ye tell Uncle Jamie we’ve gone ahead, Auntie?”
I nodded numbly, and watched them go, vanishing one after the other under the big chestnut tree that overhung the trail leading to the Bugs’ cabin. Mechanically, I got up and began slowly to clear away the remains of the makeshift breakfast.
I really wasn’t sure whether I minded a lot about Mr. Brown or not. On the one hand, I did disapprove on principle of torture and cold-blooded murder. On the other . . . while it was true enough that Brown had not personally violated or injured me, and he had tried to make Hodgepile release me—he’d been all in favor of killing me, later. And I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he would have drowned me in the gorge, had Tebbe not intervened.
No, I thought, carefully rinsing my cup and drying it on my apron, perhaps I didn’t really mind terribly about Mr. Brown.
Still, I felt uneasy and upset. What I did mind about, I realized, were Ian and Fergus. And Jamie. The fact was, killing someone in the heat of battle is a quite different thing from executing a man, and I knew that. Did they?
Well, Jamie did.
“And may your vow redeem me.” He had whispered that to me, the night before. It was just about the last thing I recalled him saying, in fact. Well, all right; but I would greatly prefer that he didn’t feel in need of redemption to start with. And as for Ian and Fergus . . .
Fergus had fought in the Battle of Prestonpans, at the age of ten. I still remembered the face of the small French orphan, soot-smeared and dazed with shock and exhaustion, looking down at me from his perch atop a captured cannon. “I killed an English soldier, madame,” he’d said to me. “He fell down and I stuck him with my knife.”
And Ian, a fifteen-year-old, weeping in remorse because he thought he had accidentally killed an intruder to Jamie’s Edinburgh print shop. God knew what he had done, since; he wasn’t talking. I had a sudden vision of Fergus’s hook, dark with blood, and Ian, silhouetted in the dark. “And I,” he’d said, echoing Jamie. “It is myself who kills for her.”
It was 1773. And on the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five . . . the shot heard