A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [363]
He shook his head, trying to decide which part of this cataract to respond to, and ended up choosing the last bit, only because he could remember it.
“Sort of. Have you been taking lessons in incoherence from Mrs. Bug?”
“How can you be sort of a minister? Wait—tell me in a minute, I have to open it up some more.”
With that, she was flitting back across the broken ground toward the gaping hole of the kiln. The tall clay-brick chimney stack rose at one end, looking like a headstone. The scorched turves that had covered it in operation were scattered round it, and the general impression was that of an enormous, smoking grave from which something large, hot, and doubtless demonic had just arisen. Had he been Catholic, he would have crossed himself.
As it was, he advanced carefully toward the edge, where Brianna was kneeling, reaching across with her shovel to remove another layer of turves from the willow-work frame that arched across the top of the pit.
Looking down through a roiling haze of smoke, he could see irregularly shaped objects, lying on the earthen shelves that lined the pit. A few he could make out as being bowls or platters. Most of them, though, were vaguely tubular objects, two or three feet long, tapered and rounded at one end, the other slightly flared. They were a dark pinkish color, streaked and darkened with smoke, and looked like nothing so much as a collection of giant barbecued phalluses, a notion that he found nearly as disturbing as the story of Jocasta’s eyeball.
“Pipes,” Brianna said proudly, pointing her shovel at one of these objects. “For water. Look—they’re perfect! Or they will be, if they don’t crack while they’re cooling.”
“Terrific,” Roger said, with a decent show of enthusiasm. “Hey—I brought ye a present.” Reaching into the side pocket of his coat, he brought out an orange, which she seized with a cry of delight, though she paused for an instant before digging her thumb into the peel.
“No, you eat it; I’ve got another for Jem,” he assured her.
“I love you,” she said again, fervently, juice running down her chin. “What about the Presbyterians? What did they say?”
“Oh. Well, basically, it’s all right. I have got the university degree, and enough Greek and Latin to impress them. The Hebrew was a bit lacking, but if I mug that up in the meantime—Reverend Caldwell gave me a book.” He patted the side of his coat.
“Yes, I can just see you preaching in Hebrew to the Crombies and Buchanans,” she said grinning. “So? What else?”
There was a fleck of orange pulp stuck to her lip, and he bent on impulse and kissed it off, the tiny burst of sweetness rich and tart on his tongue.
“Well, they examined me as to doctrine and understanding, and we talked a great deal; prayed together for discernment.” He felt somewhat shy talking to her about it. It had been a remarkable experience, like returning to a home he’d never known he’d missed. To confess his calling had been joyful; to do it among people who understood and shared it . . .
“So I’m provisionally a minister of the Word,” he said, looking down at the toes of his boots. “I’ll need to be ordained before I can administer sacraments like marriage and baptism, but that will have to wait until there’a Presbytery Session held somewhere. In the meantime, I can preach, teach, and bury.”
She was looking at him, smiling, but a little wistfully.
“You’re happy?” she said, and he nodded, unable to speak for a moment.
“Very happy,” he said at last, his voice hardly audible.
“Good,” she said softly, and smiled a little more genuinely. “I understand. So now you’re sort of handfast with God, is that it?”
He laughed, and felt his throat ease. God, he’d have to do something about that; he couldn’t be preaching drunk every Sunday. Talk of giving scandal to the faithful . . .
“Aye, that’s it. But I’m properly married to you—I’ll not forget it.”
“See that you