Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [327]
I hadn’t reached that point yet. I slid the cloak from my shoulders and covered him before going back into the cottage.
* * *
The dawn came, and relief with it, in the person of two village women and an army surgeon. The man with the wounded leg was pale and shaky, but the bleeding had stopped. Jamie took me by the arm and led me away, down the street of Tranent.
O’Sullivan’s constant difficulties with the commissary had been temporarily relieved by the captured wagons, and there was food in plenty. We ate quickly, scarcely tasting the hot porridge, aware of food only as a bodily necessity, like breathing. The feeling of nourishment began to creep through my body, freeing me to think of the next most pressing need—sleep.
Wounded men were quartered in every house and cottage, the sound of body mostly sleeping in the fields outside. While Jamie could have claimed a place in the manse with the other officers, he instead took my arm and turned me aside, heading between the cottages and up a hill, into one of the scattered small groves that lay outside Tranent.
“It’s a bit of a walk,” he said apologetically, looking down at me, “but I thought perhaps ye’d rather be private.”
“I would.” While I had been raised under conditions that would strike most people of my time as primitive—often living in tents and mud houses on Uncle Lamb’s field expeditions—still, I wasn’t used to living crowded cheek by jowl with numbers of other people, as was customary here. People ate, slept, and frequently copulated, crammed into tiny, stifling cottages, lit and warmed by smoky peat fires. The only thing they didn’t do together was bathe—largely because they didn’t bathe.
Jamie led the way under the drooping limbs of a huge horse chestnut, and into a small clearing, thick with the fallen leaves of ash, alder, and sycamore. The sun was barely up, and it was still cold under the trees, a faint edge of frost rimming some of the yellowed leaves.
He scraped a rough trench in the layer of leaves with one heel, then stood at one end of the hollow, set his hand to the buckle of his belt, and smiled at me.
“It’s a bit undignified to get into, but it’s verra easy to take off.” He jerked the belt loose, and his plaid dropped around his ankles, leaving him clad to mid-thigh in only his shirt. He usually wore the military “little kilt,” which buckled about the waist, with the plaid a separate strip of cloth around the shoulders. But now, his own kilt rent and stained from the battle, he had acquired one of the older belted plaids—nothing more than a long strip of cloth, tucked about the waist and held in place with no fastening but a belt.
“How do you get into it?” I asked curiously.
“Well, ye lay it out on the ground, like this”—he knelt, spreading the cloth so that it lined the leaf-strewn hollow—“and then ye pleat it every few inches, lie down on it, and roll.”
I burst out laughing, and sank to my knees, helping to smooth the thick tartan wool.
“That, I want to see,” I told him. “Wake me up before you get dressed.”
He shook his head good-naturedly, and the sunlight filtering through the leaves glinted off his hair.
“Sassenach, the chances of me wakin’ before you do are less than those of a worm in a henyard. I dinna care if another horse steps on me, I’ll no be moving ’til tomorrow.” He lay down carefully, pushing back the leaves.
“Come lie wi’ me.” He extended an inviting hand upward. “We’ll cover ourselves with your cloak.”
The leaves beneath the smooth wool made a surprisingly comfortable mattress, though at this point I would cheerfully have slept on a bed of nails. I relaxed bonelessly against him, reveling in the exquisite delight of simply lying down.
The initial chill faded quickly as our bodies warmed the pocket where we lay. We were