A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [580]
She sent him off then, to take the paint-stained shirt to Matilda the laundress to see what might be done, and went back to her grinding.
The mineral smell of the malachite in her mortar seemed vaguely wrong; she lifted it and sniffed, even as she did so aware that that was ridiculous: ground stone couldn’t go bad. Maybe the mixture of turpentine and the fumes from Mr. Buchanan’s pipe was affecting her sense of smell. She shook her head, and scraped the soft green powder carefully out into a vial, to be mixed with walnut oil or used in an egg tempera later.
She cast an appraising eye over the selection of boxes and pouches—some supplied by Aunt Jocasta, others courtesy of John Grey, sent specially from London—and the vials and drying trays of the pigments she’d ground herself, to see what else might be needed.
This afternoon, she’d only be making preliminary sketches—the commission was for a portrait of Mr. Forbes’s ancient mother—but she might have only a week or two to finish the job before Roger’s return; she couldn’t waste—
A wave of dizziness made her sit down suddenly, and black spots flickered through her vision. She put her head between her knees, breathing deep. That didn’t help; the air was raw with turps, and thick with the meaty, decaying animal smells of the stables below.
She lifted her head, and grabbed for the edge of the table. Her insides seemed to have turned abruptly to a liquid substance that shifted with her movement like water in a bowl, sloshing from belly to throat and back, leaving the bitter yellow smell of bile at the back of her nose.
“Oh, God.”
The liquid in her belly rushed up her throat, and she had barely time to seize the washbasin from the table and dump the water on the floor before her stomach turned inside out in the frantic effort to empty itself.
She set the basin down, very carefully, and sat panting, staring at the wet blotch on the floor, as the world beneath her shifted on its axis and settled at a new, uneasy angle.
“Congratulations, Roger,” she said out loud, her voice sounding faint and uncertain in the close, damp air. “I think you’re going to be a daddy. Again.”
SHE SAT STILL for some time, cautiously exploring the sensations of her body, looking for certainty. She hadn’t been sick with Jemmy—but she remembered the oddly altered quality of her senses; that odd state called synesthesia, where sight, smell, taste, and even sometimes hearing occasionally and weirdly took on characteristics of each other.
It had gone away as abruptly as it had happened; the tang of Mr. Buchanan’s tobacco was much stronger, but now it was only the mellow burning of cured leaves, not a mottled green-brown thing that writhed through her sinuses and rattled the membranes of her brain like a tin roof in a hailstorm.
She had been concentrating so hard on her bodily sensations and what they might or might not mean that she hadn’t really noticed the voices in the next room. That was Duncan’s modest lair, where he kept the ledgers and accounts of the estate and—she thought—went to hide, when the grandeur of the house became too much for him.
Mr. Buchanan was in there with Duncan now, and what had started out as a genial thrum of conversation was now showing signs of strain. She got up, relieved to feel only a slight residual clamminess now, and picked up the basin. She had the natural human inclinations toward eavesdropping, but lately, she had been careful not to hear anything but what she must.
Duncan and her aunt Jocasta were stout Loyalists, and nothing she could say by way of tactful urging or logical argument would sway them. She had overheard more than one of Duncan’s private conversations with local Tories that made her heart go small with apprehension, knowing as she did what would be the outcome of the present events.
Here in the piedmont, in the heart of the Cape Fear country, most of the solid citizens were