A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [191]
He was turning the pages of Tom Jones slowly, lips pursed in concentration. Evidently Henry Fielding would do as anesthetic for the job at hand; I shouldn’t need to fetch a Bible.
“Do you read novels?” I asked, meaning no rudeness, but merely surprised that he might countenance anything so frivolous.
He hesitated. “Yes. I—yes.” He took a very deep breath as I submerged his hand in the bowl, but it contained only water, soaproot, and a very small amount of alcohol, and he let the breath go with a sigh.
“Have you read Tom Jones before?” I asked, making conversation to relax him.
“Not precisely, though I know the story. My wife—”
He stopped abruptly. He’d never mentioned his wife before; I supposed that it was sheer relief at not experiencing agony yet that had made him talkative. He seemed to realize that he must complete the sentence, though, and went on, reluctantly. “My wife . . . read novels.”
“Did she?” I murmured, setting about the job of debridement. “Did she like them?”
“I suppose that she must have.”
There was something odd in his voice that made me glance up from the job at hand. He caught the glance and looked away, flushing.
“I—did not approve of reading novels. Then.”
He was quiet for a moment, holding his hand steady. Then he blurted, “I burnt her books.”
That sounded rather more like the response I would have expected of him.
“She couldn’t have been pleased about that,” I said mildly, and he shot me a startled glance, as though the question of his wife’s reaction was so irrelevant as to be unworthy of remark.
“Ah . . . what caused you to alter your opinion?” I asked, concentrating on the bits of debris I was picking out of the wound with my forceps. Splinters and shreds of bark. What had he been doing? Wielding a club of some kind, I thought—a tree branch? I breathed deeply, concentrating on the job to avoid thinking of the bodies in the clearing.
He moved his legs restively; I was hurting him a bit now.
“I—it—in Ardsmuir.”
“What? You read it in prison?”
“No. We had no books there.” He took a long breath, glanced at me, then away, and fixed his eyes on the corner of the room, where an enterprising spider had taken advantage of Mrs. Bug’s temporary absence to set up web-keeping.
“In fact, I have never actually read it. Mr. Fraser, though, was accustomed to recount the story to the other prisoners. He has a fine memory,” he added, rather grudgingly.
“Yes, he does,” I murmured. “I’m not going to stitch it; it will be better if the wound’s left to heal by itself. I’m afraid the scar won’t be as neat,” I added regretfully, “but I think it will heal up all right.”
I spread salve thickly over the injury, and pulled the edges of the wound together as tightly as I could, without cutting off the circulation. Bree had been experimenting with adhesive bandages, and had produced something quite useful in the way of small butterfly shapes, made of starched linen and pine tar.
“So you liked Tom Jones, did you?” I said, returning to the subject. “I shouldn’t have thought you’d find him an admirable character. Not much of a moral example, I mean.”
“I don’t,” he said bluntly. “But I saw that fiction”—he pronounced the word gingerly, as though it were something dangerous—“is perhaps not, as I had thought, merely an inducement to idleness and wicked fancy.”
“Oh, isn’t it?” I said, amused, but trying not to smile because of my lip. “What are its redeeming characteristics, do you think?”
“Aye, well.” His brows drew together in thought “I found it most remarkable. That what is essentially nothing save a confection of lies should somewise still contrive to exert a beneficial effect. For it did,” he concluded, sounding still rather surprised.
“Really? How was that?”
He tilted his head, considering.
“It was distraction, to be sure. In such conditions, distraction is not evil,” he assured me. “While it is of course more desirable to escape into prayer . .