A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [303]
“I can’t,” she said, raising her voice above the sound of the stream.
“Yes, ye can,” he said, as encouragingly as possible, and stretched out a hand to help her. “Come on; I’ll give ye a hand with your things.”
She shook her head more decidedly, pink lower lip poking out a bit.
“No. My father—he’ll no have it.” She glanced in the direction of the cabin, and he turned to look, but it was all right; neither Allan nor Tom had followed him. Yet.
He kicked off his shoes and stepped into the icy creek, the stones rolling, hard and slippery under his feet. Malva’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open as he bent and grabbed her basket, ripped it from her apron string, and tossed it onto the bank. Then he took the knife from her hand, thrust it through his belt, grabbed her round the waist, and picking her up, splashed ashore with her, disregarding the kicking and squealing.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, grunting as he set her down. “Ye want to walk, or do I carry you?”
He thought she seemed more intrigued than horrified at this proposal, but she shook her head again, backing away from him.
“I can’t—truly! He’ll—he’ll beat me if he finds out I’ve been meddling wi’ the ether.”
That checked him momentarily. Would he? Perhaps. But Aidan’s life was at stake.
“He won’t find out, then,” he said. “Or if he does, I’ll see to it that he does ye no harm. Come, for God’s sake—there’s no time to be wasting!”
Her small pink mouth compressed itself in stubbornness. No time for scruples, then. He leaned down to bring his face close to hers and stared her in the eye.
“You’ll come,” he said, fists curling, “or I tell your father and your brother about you and Bobby Higgins. Say what ye like about me—I don’t care. But if ye think your father would beat you for helping Mrs. Fraser, what’s he likely to do if he hears ye’ve been snogging Bobby?”
He didn’t know what the eighteenth-century equivalent of snogging was, but plainly she understood him. And if she’d been anywhere near his own size, she would have knocked him down, if he read the dangerous light in those big gray eyes correctly.
But she wasn’t, and after an instant’s consideration, she bent, dried her legs on her skirts, and shuffled hurriedly into her sandals.
“Leave it,” she said briefly, seeing him stoop for the basket. “And give me back my knife.”
It might have been simply an urge to keep some influence over her until she was safely in the surgery—surely he wasn’t afraid of her. He put a hand to the knife at his belt, though, and said, “Later. When it’s done.”
She didn’t bother arguing, but scampered up the bank ahead of him and headed for the Big House, the soles of her sandals flapping against her bare heels.
I HAD MY FINGERS on the brachial pulse in Aidan’s armpit, counting. His skin was very hot to the touch, maybe a temperature of 101, 102. The pulse was strong, though rapid . . . slowing as he went further under. I could feel Malva counting under her breath, so many drops of ether, so long a pause before the next . . . I lost my own count of the pulse, but it didn’t matter; I was taking it into myself, feeling my own pulse begin to beat in the same rhythm, and it was normal, steady.
He was breathing well. The little abdomen rose and fell slightly under my hand, and I could feel the muscles relaxing by the moment, everything except the tense, distended belly, the visible ribs arching high above it as he breathed. I had the sudden illusion that I could push my hand straight through the wall of his abdomen and touch the swollen appendix, could see it in my mind, throbbing malignantly in the dark security of its sealed world. Time, then.
Mrs. McCallum made a small sound when I took up the scalpel, a louder one when I pressed it down into the pale flesh, still gleaming wet with the alcohol I’d swabbed it with, like a fish’s belly yielding to the gutting knife.
The skin parted easily, blood welling in that odd, magical way, seeming to appear from nowhere. He had almost no fat beneath it; the muscles were right there, dark red, resilient