A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [197]
“KILL ME.” Randall’s eyes were fever-bright. “Kill me,” he said. “My heart’s desire.”
He jerked awake, hearing the words echo in his head, seeing the eyes, seeing the rain-matted hair, Randall’s face, wet as that of a drowned man.
He rubbed a hand hard over his own face, surprised to feel his skin dry, his beard no more than a shadow. The sense of wet, the itching scurf of a month’s whiskers, was still so strong that he got up, moving quietly by instinct, and went to the window, where moonlight shone through the cracks in the shutter. He poured a little water into the basin, moved the bowl into a shaft of light, and looked in, to rid himself of that lingering sense of being someone else, somewhere else.
The face in the water was no more than a featureless oval, but smooth-shaven, and the hair lay loose on his shoulders, not bound up for battle. And yet it seemed the face of a stranger.
Unsettled, he left the water in the bowl, and after a moment, padded softly back to the bed.
She was asleep. He had not even thought of her when he woke, but now the sight of her steadied him. That face he knew, even battered and swollen as it was.
He set his hand on the bedstead, comforted by the solid wood. Sometimes when he woke, the dream stayed with him, and he felt the real world ghostly, faint around him. Sometimes he feared he was a ghost.
But the sheets were cool on his skin, and Claire’s warmth a reassurance. He reached for her, and she rolled over, curled herself backward into his arms with a small moan of content, her bum roundly solid against him.
She fell asleep again at once; she hadn’t really waked. He had an urge to rouse her, make her talk to him—only to be quite sure she could see him, hear him. He only held her tight, though, and over her curly head he watched the door, as though it might open and Jack Randall stand there, soaked and streaming.
Kill me, he’d said. My heart’s desire.
His heart beat slow, echoing in the ear he pressed against the pillow. Some nights, he would fall asleep listening to it, comforted by the fleshy, monotonous thump. Other times, like now, he would hear instead the mortal silence in between the beats—that silence that patiently awaits all men.
He had drawn the quilts up, but now put them back, so that Claire was covered but his own back lay bare, open to the chill of the room, that he might not slip warmly into sleep and risk returning to the dream. Let sleep struggle for him in the cold, and at last pull him off the precipice of consciousness, down to the deeps of black oblivion.
For he did not wish to know what Randall had meant by what he said.
32
HANGING’S TOO GOOD
IN THE MORNING, Mrs. Bug was back in the kitchen, and the air was warm and fragrant with the smells of cooking. She seemed quite as usual, and beyond a brief glance at my face and a “tsk!”, not inclined to fuss. Either she had more sensitivity than I’d thought, or Jamie had had a word.
“Here, a muirninn, have it while it’s hot.” Mrs. Bug slid a heap of turkey hash from the platter onto my plate, and deftly topped it with a fried egg.
I nodded thanks and picked up my fork, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. My jaw was still so sore that eating was a slow and painful business.
The egg went down all right, but the smell of burned onion seemed very strong, oily in my nostrils. I separated a small bite of potato and mashed it against the roof of my mouth, squashing it with my tongue in lieu of chewing it, then washing it down with a sip of coffee.
More in hopes of distracting myself than because I truly wanted to know, I asked, “And how is Mr. Brown this morning?”
Her lips tightened, and she smacked down a spatula of fried potatoes as though they were Brown’s brains.
“Nowhere near sae badly off as he ought to be,” she said. “Hanging’s too good for him, and him nay more than a wretched dungheap, crawling wi’ maggots.”
I spit out the bit of potato I’d been mangling, and took another hasty gulp of coffee. It hit bottom and started back up. I pushed back the bench and ran for the door, reaching it just in