A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [67]
“How is it, then, a charaid?” Duncan greeted him genially, gesturing toward one of the basketwork chairs. “Ye’ll take a dram, perhaps?”
“I will, and thanks.”
He sank gratefully into the chair, which creaked amiably beneath his weight. He accepted the glass Duncan handed him, and tossed it back with a brief “Slàinte.”
The whisky burned through the strictures that bound his throat, making him cough, but seeming suddenly to open things, so that the constant faint sense of choking began to leave him. He sipped, grateful.
“Ready to go, are they?” Duncan nodded toward the meadow, where the smoke of campfires hung in a low golden haze.
“Ready as they’ll ever be. Poor things,” Roger added with some sympathy.
Duncan raised one shaggy brow.
“Fish out of water,” Roger amplified, holding out his glass to accept the proffered refill. “The women are terrified, and so are the men, but they hide it better. Ye’d think I was taking them all to be slaves on a sugar plantation.”
Duncan nodded. “Or sell them to Rome to clean the Pope’s shoon,” he said wryly. “I misdoubt most of them had ever smelt a Catholic before embarking. And from the wrinkled noses, they dinna care so much for the scent now, I think. Do they so much as tak’ a dram now and then, d’ye ken?”
“Only medicinally, and only if in actual danger of death, I think.” Roger took a slow, ambrosial swallow and closed his eyes, feeling the whisky warm his throat and curl in his chest like a purring cat. “Meet Hiram yet, did you? Hiram Crombie, the head man of this lot.”
“The wee sour-drap wi’ the stick up his arse? Aye, I met him.” Duncan grinned, his drooping mustache lifting at the end. “He’ll be at supper with us. Best have another.”
“I will, thanks,” said Roger, extending his glass. “Though they’re none of them much for hedonistic pleasure, so far as I can tell. Ye’d think they were all still Covenanters to the bone. The Frozen Chosen, aye?”
Duncan laughed immoderately at that.
“Well, it’s no like it was in my grandsire’s day,” he said, recovering and reaching across for the decanter. “And thank the Lord for that.” He rolled his eyes, grimacing.
“Your grandsire was a Covenanter, then?”
“God, yes.” Shaking his head, Duncan poured a goodly measure, first for Roger, then himself. “A fierce auld bastard, he was. Not that he’d no cause, mind. His sister was stakit to droon, ken?”
“Was—Christ.” He bit his tongue in penance, but was too interested to pay it much mind. “Ye mean—executed by drowning?”
Duncan nodded, eyes on his glass, then took a good gulp and held it for a moment in his mouth before swallowing.
“Margaret,” he said. “Her name was Margaret. Eighteen she was, at the time. Her father and her brother—my grandfather, aye?—they’d fled, after the battle at Dunbar; hid in the hills. The troops came a-hunting them, but she wouldna say where they’d gone—and she had a Bible by her. They tried to make her recant then, but she wouldna do that, either—the women on that side o’ the family, ye might as well talk to a stone,” he said, shaking his head. “There’s no moving them. But they dragged her doon to the shore, her and an auld Covenanter woman from the village, stripped them, and tied them both to stakes at the tide line. Waited there, the crowd o’ them, for the water to come in.”
He took another swallow, not waiting for the taste of it.
“The auld woman went under first; they’d tied her closer to the water—I suppose thinking Margaret would give in, if she saw the auld woman die.” He grunted, shaking his head. “But nay, not a bit of it. The tide rose, and the waves came up ower her. She choked, and she coughed, and her hair loose, hanging over her face, plastered doon like kelp, when the water went out.
“My mither saw it,” he explained, lifting his glass. “She was but seven at the time, but she never forgot. After the first wave, she said,