A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [69]
“Your lip, Duncan.” He touched his own mouth briefly. “What did that?”
“Och, that?” Duncan touched his own lip, surprised. “Nay, I was born wi’ a harelip, or so they said. I dinna recall it, myself; it was mended when I was nay more than a week old.”
It was Roger’s turn to be surprised.
“Who mended it?”
Duncan shrugged, one-shouldered this time.
“A traveling healer, my mither said. She’d quite resigned herself to losin’ me, she said, because I couldna suck, of course. She and my aunties all took it in turn to drap milk into my mouth from a rag, but she said I’d wasted nearly to a wee skeleton, when this charmer came by the village.”
He rubbed a knuckle self-consciously over his lip, smoothing the thick, grizzled hairs of his mustache.
“My faither gave him six herrings and a mull o’ snuff, and he stitched it up, and gave my mither a bit o’ some ointment to put on the wound. Well, and so . . .” He shrugged again, with a lopsided smile.
“Perhaps I was destined to live, after all. My grandsire said the Lord had chosen me—though God only kens what for.”
Roger was conscious of a faint ripple of unease, dulled though it was by whisky.
A Highland charmer who could repair a harelip? He took another drink, trying not to stare, but covertly examining Duncan’s face. He supposed it was possible; the scar was just barely visible—if you knew to look—under Duncan’s mustache, but didn’t extend up into the nostril. It must have been a fairly simple harelip, then, not one of the hideous cases like that one he’d read about—unable to look away from the page for horror—in Claire’s big black doctor’s book, where Dr. Rawlings had described a child born not only with a split lip, but missing the roof of its mouth, and most of the center of its face, as well.
There had been no drawing, thank God, but the visual picture conjured up by Rawlings’s spare description had been bad enough. He closed his eyes and breathed deep, inhaling the whisky’s perfume through his pores.
Was it possible? Perhaps. People did do surgery now, bloodstained, crude, and agonizing as it was. He’d seen Murray MacLeod, the apothecary from Campbelton, expertly stitch up a man’s cheek, laid open when the man was trampled by a sheep. Would it be any more difficult to stitch a child’s mouth?
He thought of Jemmy’s lip, tender as a blossom, pierced by needle and black thread, and shuddered.
“Are ye cold, then, a charaid? Shall we go in?” Duncan got his feet under him, as though to rise, but Roger waved the older man back.
“Ah, no. Goose walking on my grave.” He smiled, and accepted another drop to keep the nonexistent evening chill away. And yet he felt the hairs on his arms rise, just a little. Could there be another one—more—like us?
There had been, he knew. His own multiple-times great-grandmother, Geillis, for one. The man whose skull Claire had found, complete with silver fillings in its teeth, for another. But had Duncan met another, in some remote Highland village half a century before?
Christ, he thought, freshly unnerved. How often does it happen? And what happens to them?
Before they had quite reached the bottom of the decanter, he heard footsteps behind him, and the rustle of silk.
“Mrs. Cameron.” He rose at once, the world tilting just a little, and took his hostess’s hand, bowing over it.
Her long hand touched his face, as was her habit, her sensitive fingertips confirming his identity.
“Och, there ye are, Jo. Had a good journey wi’ the wee lad, did ye?” Duncan struggled to rise, handicapped by whisky and his single arm, but Ulysses, Jocasta’s butler, had materialized silently out of the twilight behind his mistress in time to move her wicker chair into place. She sank into it without so much as putting a hand out to see that it was there, Roger noticed; she simply knew it would be.
Roger viewed the butler with interest, wondering who Jocasta had bribed