Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [292]
“Ah,” Jenny sighed. Her shoulders slumped a fraction as the flow of milk started. “That’s better, my wee piggie, no?” She opened her eyes and smiled at me, eyes clear and blue as her brother’s.
“ ’Twas kind of ye to keep the lassie all night; I slept like the dead.”
I shrugged, smiling at the picture of mother and child, relaxed together in total content. The curve of the baby’s head exactly echoed the high, round curve of Jenny’s breast and small, slurping noises came from the little bundle as her body sagged against her mother’s, fitting easily into the curve of Jenny’s lap.
“It was Jamie, not me,” I said. “He and his niece seem to have got on well together.” The picture of them came back to me, Jamie talking in earnest, low tones to the child, tears slipping down his face.
Jenny nodded, watching my face.
“Aye. I thought perhaps they’d comfort each other a bit. He doesna sleep well these days?” Her voice held a question.
“No,” I answered softly. “He has a lot on his mind.”
“Well he might,” she said, glancing at the bed behind me. Ian was gone already, risen at dawn to see to the stock in the barn. The horses that could be spared from the farming—and some that couldn’t—needed shoeing, needed harness, in preparation for their journey to rebellion.
“You can talk to a babe, ye ken,” she said suddenly, breaking into my thought. “Really talk, I mean. Ye can tell them anything, no matter how foolish it would sound did ye say it to a soul could understand ye.”
“Oh. You heard him, then?” I asked. She nodded, eyes on the curve of Katherine’s cheek, where the tiny dark lashes lay against the fair skin, eyes closed in ecstasy.
“Aye. Ye shouldna worrit yourself,” she added, smiling gently at me. “It isna that he feels he canna talk to you; he knows he can. But it’s different to talk to a babe that way. It’s a person; ye ken that you’re not alone. But they dinna ken your words, and ye don’t worry a bit what they’ll think of ye, or what they may feel they must do. You can pour out your heart to them wi’out choosing your words, or keeping anything back at all—and that’s a comfort to the soul.”
She spoke matter-of-factly, as though this were something that everyone knew. I wondered whether she spoke that way often to her child. The generous wide mouth, so like her brother’s, lifted slightly at one side.
“It’s the way ye talk to them before they’re born,” she said softly. “You’ll know?”
I placed my hands gently over my belly, one atop the other, remembering.
“Yes, I know.”
She pressed a thumb against the baby’s cheek, breaking the suction, and with a deft movement, shifted the small body to bring the full breast within reach.
“I’ve thought that perhaps that’s why women are so often sad, once the child’s born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they’re born, and they’re different—not the way ye thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them, o’ course, and get to know them the way they are…but still, there’s the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the grievin’ for the child unborn that ye feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.” She dipped her head and kissed her daughter’s downy skull.
“Yes,” I said. “Before…it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is.”
She rocked gently back and forth, and the small clutching hand that seized the folds of green silk over her breast began to loose its grip.
“And a daughter is born, and the son that she might have been is dead,” she said quietly. “And the bonny lad at your breast has killed the wee lassie ye thought ye carried. And ye weep for what you didn’t know, that’s gone for good, until you know the child