A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [541]
Sadie was regarding me with respect, mingled with a slight revulsion.
“That’s the messiest business I ever did see,” she said. “Heavens above, is it always like that?”
“More or less. Haven’t you ever seen a child born? You’ve never had one yourself?” I asked curiously. She shook her head vigorously, and made the sign of the horns, which made me laugh, giddy as I was.
“Had I ever been disposed to let a man near me, the thought of that would dissuade me,” she assured me fervently.
“Oh, yes?” I said, belatedly recalling her overtures of the night before. It wasn’t merely comfort she’d been offering, then. “And what about Mister Ferguson?”
She gave me a demure look, blinking through her spectacles.
“Oh, he was a farmer—much older than I. Dead of the pleurisy, these five years gone.”
And totally fictitious, I was inclined to think. But a widow had a great deal more freedom than did a maid or a wife, and if ever I saw a woman capable of taking care of herself . . .
I had been paying no attention to the sounds in the kitchen, but at this point, there was a heavy crash and the sheriff’s voice, cursing. No sound of the child or Mrs. Tolliver.
“Taking the black bitch back to her quarters,” Sadie said, with such a hostile intonation that I glanced at her in amazement.
“Didn’t you know?” she said, seeing my surprise. “She’s killed her babies. They can hang her, now she’s borne this one.”
“Oh,” I said a little blankly. “No. I didn’t know.” The noises in the kitchen receded, and I sat staring at the rush dip, the sense of life still moving in my hands.
91
A REASONABLY
NEAT SCHEME
WATER LAPPED JUST UNDER JAMIE’S EAR, Jamie’s ear, the mere sound of it making him feel queasy. The reek of decaying mud and dead fish didn’t help, nor did the dunt he’d taken when he fell against the wall.
He shifted, trying to find some position that would ease head, stomach, or both. They’d trussed him like a boiled fowl, but he managed with some effort to roll onto his side and bring his knees up, which helped a bit.
He was in a dilapidated boat shed of some sort; he’d seen it in the last of the twilight, when they’d brought him down to the shore—he’d thought at first they meant to drown him—and carried him inside, dropping him on the floor like a sack of flour.
“Hurry up, Ian,” he muttered, shifting again, in increasing discomfort. “I’m a great deal too old for this sort of nonsense.”
He could only hope his nephew had been close enough when Brown moved to have been able to follow, and to have some notion where he was now; certainly the lad would be looking. The shore where the shed stood was open, no cover, but there was plenty among the brush below Fort Johnston, standing on the headland a little way above him.
The back of his head throbbed dully, giving him a nasty taste in the back of the mouth, and a disquieting echo of the shattering headaches he used to suffer in the wake of an ax wound that had cracked his skull, many years before. He was shocked at how easily the recollection of those headaches came back; it had happened a lifetime ago, and he had thought even the memory of it dead and buried. His skull clearly had a much more vivid memory of its own, though, and was determined to make him sick by way of revenge for his forgetfulness.
The moon was up, and bright; the light shone soft through the cracks between the crude boards of the wall. Dim as it was, it seemed to shift, wavering in a disturbingly qualmish fashion, and he shut his eyes, concentrating grimly on what he might do to Richard Brown, and he got the man alone someday.
Where in the name of Michael and all the saints had he taken Claire, and why? Jamie’s only comfort was that Tom Christie had gone with them. He was fairly sure that Christie wouldn’t let them kill her—and if Jamie could find him, he would lead him to her.
A sound reached him above the nauseating lapping of the tide. Faint whistling—then singing. He could just make out the words, and smiled a little,