Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [244]
“He said, ‘You. Come along,’ and took me by the arm. I held back, Madame—I told him my employer was above, and that I couldn’t—but he wouldn’t listen. Madame Elise whispered in my ear that I should go with him, and she would split the money with me afterward.” Fergus shrugged, and looked at me helplessly. “I knew the ones who like little boys don’t usually take very long; I thought he would be finished long before milord was ready to leave.”
“Jesus bloody Christ,” I said. My fingers relaxed their grip and slid nervelessly down his sleeve. “Do you mean—Fergus, had you done it before?”
He looked as though he wanted to cry. So did I.
“Not very often, Madame,” he said, and it was almost a plea for understanding. “There are houses where that is the specialty, and usually the men who like that go there. But sometimes a customer would see me and take a fancy…” His nose was starting to run and he wiped it with the back of his hand.
I rummaged in my pocket for a handkerchief and gave it to him. He was beginning to sniffle as he recalled that Friday morning.
“He was much bigger than I thought. I asked him if I could take it in my mouth, but he…but he wanted to…”
I pulled him to me and pressed his head tight against my shoulder, muffling his voice in the cloth of my gown. The frail blades of his shoulder bones were like a bird’s wings under my hand.
“Don’t tell me any more,” I said. “Don’t. It’s all right, Fergus; I’m not angry. But don’t tell me any more.”
This was a futile order; he couldn’t stop talking, after so many days of fear and silence.
“But it’s all my fault, Madame!” he burst out, pulling away. His lip was trembling, and tears welled in his eyes. “I should have kept quiet; I shouldn’t have cried out! But I couldn’t help it, and milord heard me, and…and he burst in…and…oh, Madame, I shouldn’t have, but I was so glad to see him, and I ran to him, and he put me behind him and hit the Englishman in the face. And then the Englishman came up from the floor with the stool in his hand, and threw it, and I was so afraid, I ran out of the room and hid in the closet at the end of the hall. Then there was so much shouting and banging, and a terrible crash, and more shouting. And then it stopped, and soon milord opened the door of the closet and took me out. He had my clothes, and he dressed me himself, because I couldn’t fasten the buttons—my fingers shook.”
He grabbed my skirt with both hands, the necessity of making me believe him tightening his face into a monkey mask of grief.
“It’s my fault, Madame, but I didn’t know! I didn’t know he would go to fight the Englishman. And now milord is gone, and he’ll never come back, and it’s all my fault!”
Wailing now, he fell facedown on the ground at my feet. He was crying so loudly that I didn’t think he heard me as I bent to lift him up, but I said it anyway.
“It isn’t your fault, Fergus. It isn’t mine, either—but you’re right; he’s gone.”
* * *
Following Fergus’s revelation, I sank ever deeper into apathy. The gray cloud that had surrounded me since the miscarriage seemed to draw closer, wrapping me in swaddling folds that dimmed the light of the brightest day. Sounds seemed to reach me faintly, like the far-off ringing of a buoy through fog at sea.
Louise stood in front of me, frowning worriedly as she looked down at me.
“You’re much too thin,” she scolded. “And white as a plate of tripes. Yvonne said you didn’t eat any breakfast again!”
I couldn’t remember when I had last been hungry. It hardly seemed important. Long before the Bois de Boulogne, long before my trip to Paris. I fixed my gaze on the mantelpiece and drifted off into the curlicues of the rococo carving. Louise’s voice went on, but I didn’t pay attention; it was only a noise in the room, like the