A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [386]
“Only as pictures. Films, I mean. Television.” That one he would never understand, and I could not explain. The way in which such pictures focused on war itself; bombs and planes and submarines, and the thrilling urgency of blood shed on purpose; a sense of nobility in deliberate death.
He knew what battlefields were really like—battlefields, and what came after them.
“The men who fought in those wars—and the women—they didn’t die of the killing, most of them. They died like this—” A lift of my mug toward the open window, toward the peaceful mountains, the distant hollow where Padraic MacNeill’s cabin lay hidden. “They died of illness and neglect, because there wasn’t any way to stop it.”
“I have seen that,” he said softly, with a glance at the stoppered bottles. “Plague and ague run rampant in a city, half a regiment dead of flux.”
“Of course you have.”
Butterflies were rising among the flowers in the dooryard, cabbage whites and sulfur yellows, here and there the great, lazy sail of a late tiger swallowtail out of the shadow of the wood. My thumb still rested on his wrist, feeling his heartbeat, slow and powerful.
“Brianna was born seven years after penicillin came into common use. She was born in America—not this one”—I nodded toward the window again—“but that one, that will be. There, it isn’t usual for lots of people to die of contagious illness.” I glanced at him. The light had reached his waist, and glowed on the metal cup in his hand.
“Do you remember the first person you knew of who had died?”
His face went blank with surprise, then sharpened, thinking. After a moment, he shook his head.
“My brother was the first who was important, but I kent others before him, surely.”
“I can’t remember, either.” My parents, of course; their deaths had been personal—but born in England, I had lived in the shadow of cenotaphs and memorials, and people just beyond the bounds of my own family died regularly; I had a sudden vivid memory, of my father putting on a homburg and dark coat to go to the baker’s wife’s funeral. Mrs. Briggs, her name had been. But she hadn’t been the first; I knew already about death and funerals. How old had I been then—four, perhaps?
I was very tired. My eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and the delicate early light was brightening to full sun.
“I think Frank’s was the first death Brianna ever experienced personally. Maybe there were others; I can’t be sure. But the point is—”
“I see the point.” He reached to take the empty cup from my hand, and set it on the counter, then drained his own and set it down, too.
“But it’s no herself she fears for, aye?” he asked, his eyes penetrating. “It’s the wean.”
I nodded. She would have known, of course, in an academic sort of way, that such things were possible. But to have a child die suddenly before you, from something like a simple case of diarrhea . . .
“She’s a good mother,” I said, and yawned suddenly. She was. But it would never have struck her in any visceral way that something so negligible as a germ could suddenly snatch away her child. Not until yesterday.
Jamie stood up suddenly, and pulled me to my feet.
“Go to bed, Sassenach,” he said. “That will wait.” He nodded at the microscope. “I’ve never known shit spoil with keeping.”
I laughed, and collapsed slowly against him, my cheek pressed against his chest.
“Maybe you’re right.” Still, I didn’t push away. He held me, and we watched the sunlight grow, creeping slowly up the wall.
62
AMOEBA
I TURNED THE MIRROR OF the microscope a fraction of an inch further, to get as much light as I could.
“There.” I stepped back, motioning Malva to come and look. “Do you see it? The big, clear thing in the middle, lobed, with the little flecks in it?”
She frowned, squinting one-eyed into the ocular, then drew in her breath in a gasp of triumph.
“I see it plain! Like a currant pudding someone’s dropped on the floor,