A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [628]
“Come along, mo nighean. Yon creature wouldna notice if the house fell down atop her.” Jamie had come down from feeding the animals in the stable, and was hovering impatiently behind me, chafing his hands in the big blue mittens Bree had knitted for him.
“What, not even if it was on fire?” I said, thinking of Lamb’s “Essay on Roast Pork.” But I turned obligingly to follow him down the trampled path past the side of the house, then slowly, slipping on the icy patches, across the wide clearing toward Bree and Roger’s cabin.
“Ye’re sure the hearth fire’s out?” Jamie asked, for the third time. His breath wreathed round his head like a veil as he looked over his shoulder at me. He had lost his woolen cap hunting, and instead had a woolly white muffler wrapped around his ears and tied on top of his head, the long ends flopping, which made him look absurdly like an enormous rabbit.
“It is,” I assured him, suppressing an urge to laugh at sight of him. His long nose was pink with cold, and twitched suspiciously, and I buried my face in my own muffler, making small snorting noises that emerged as puffs of white, like a steam engine.
“And the bedroom candle? The wee lamp in your surgery?”
“Yes,” I assured him, emerging from the depths of the muffler. My eyes were watering and I would have liked to wipe them, but I had a huge bundle in one arm and a covered basket hung on the other. This contained Adso, who had been forcibly removed from the house, and wasn’t pleased about it; small growls emerged from the basket, and it swayed and thumped against my leg.
“And the rush dip in the pantry, and the candle in the wall sconce in the hall, and the brazier in your office, and the fish-oil lantern you use in the stables. I went over the whole house with a nit comb. Not a spark anywhere.”
“Well enough, then,” he said—but couldn’t help an uneasy glance backward at the house. I looked, too; it looked cold and forlorn, the white of its boards rather grimy against the pristine snow.
“It won’t be an accident,” I said. “Not unless the white sow is playing with matches in her den.”
That made him smile, in spite of the circumstances. Frankly, at the moment, the circumstances struck me as slightly absurd; the whole world seemed deserted, frozen solid and immobile under a winter sky. Nothing seemed less likely than that cataclysm could descend to destroy the house by fire. Still . . . better safe than sorry. And as Jamie had remarked more than once during the years since Roger and Bree had brought word of that sinister newspaper clipping, “If ye ken the house is meant to burn down on a certain day, why would ye be standing in it?”
So we weren’t standing in it. Mrs. Bug had been told to stay at home, and Amy McCallum and her two little boys were already at Brianna’s cabin—puzzled, but obliging. If Himself said that no one was to set foot in the house until dawn tomorrow . . . well, then, there was nothing more to be said, was there?
Ian had been up since before dawn, chopping kindling and hauling in firewood from the shed; everyone would be snug and warm.
Jamie himself had been up all night, tending stock, dispersing his armory—there was not a grain of gunpowder anywhere in the house, either—and prowling restlessly upstairs and down, alert to every cracking ember on a hearth, every burning candle flame, any faint noise without that might portend the approach of an enemy. The only thing he hadn’t done was to sit on the roof with a wet sack, keeping a suspicious eye out for lightning—and that, only because it had been a cloudless night, the stars immense and bright overhead, burning in the frozen void.
I hadn’t slept a great deal, either, disturbed equally by Jamie’s prowling and by vivid dreams of conflagration.
The only conflagration visible, though, was the one sending a welcome shower of smoke and sparks from Brianna’s chimney, and we opened the door to the grateful warmth of