Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [130]
“I … die …”
“I think ye are murdered, lass,” Jamie said to her, very gently. “Will ye not say who has killed you?”
Her breath came louder now, a soft rattle in her throat. Pit. Pat. Pit. Pat. The feet were tiptoeing softly now.
“Ser … geant. Tell … him …”
I drew my hand out from between her thighs and took her other hand in mine, heedless of the blood. It scarcely mattered now, after all.
“ … tell …” came with sudden intensity, and then silence. A long silence, and then, another long, sighing breath. A silence, even longer. And a breath.
“I will,” said Jamie. His voice was no more than a whisper in the dark. “I will do it. I promise ye.”
Pit.
Pat.
They called it the “death drop,” in the Highlands; the sound of dripping water, heard in a house when one of the inhabitants was about to die. Not water dripping here, but a sure sign, nonetheless.
There was no more sound from the darkness. I couldn’t see Jamie, but felt the slight movement of the bed against my thighs as he leaned forward.
“God will forgive ye,” he whispered to the silence. “Go in peace.”
I could hear the buzzing the moment we stepped into the overseer’s quarters the next morning. In the huge, dusty silence of the mill, everything had been muffled in space and sawdust. But in this small, partitioned area the walls caught every sound and threw it back; our footsteps echoed from wooden floor to wooden ceiling. I felt like a fly sealed inside a snare drum, and suffered a moment’s claustrophobia, trapped as I was in the narrow passage between the two men.
There were only two rooms, separated by a short passage that led from the outdoors into the mill proper. On our right lay the larger room that had served the Byrneses for living and cooking, and on the left, the smaller bedroom, from which the noise was coming. Jamie took a deep breath, clasped his plaid to his face, and pulled open the bedroom door.
It looked like a blanket covering the bed, a blanket of gunmetal blue sparked with green. Then Jamie took a step into the room and the flies rose buzzing from their clotted meal in a swarm of gluttonous protest.
I bit back a cry of abhorrence and ducked, flailing at them. Bloated, slow-moving bodies hit my face and arms and bounced away, circling lazily through the thick air. Farquard Campbell made a Scottish noise of overpowering disgust that sounded like “Heuch!” then lowered his head and pushed past me, eyes slitted and lips pressed tight together, nostrils pinched to whiteness.
The tiny bedroom was hardly bigger than the coffin it had become. There were no windows, only cracks between the boards that let in a dim uncertain light. The atmosphere was hot and humid as a tropical greenhouse, thick with the rotting-sweet smell of death. I could feel the sweat snaking down my sides, ticklish as flies’ feet, and tried to breathe only through my mouth.
She had not been large; her body made only the slightest mound beneath the blanket we had laid over her the night before, for decency’s sake. Her head seemed big by contrast to the shrunken body, like a child’s stick figure with a round ball stuck on toothpick limbs.
Brushing away several flies too glutted to move, Jamie pulled back the blanket. The blanket, like everything else, was blotched and crusted, sodden at the foot. The human body, on average, contains eight pints of blood, but it seems a lot more when you spread it around.
I had seen her face briefly the night before, dead features lent an artificial glow by the light of the pine splinter Jamie held above her. Now she lay pallid and dank as a mushroom, blunt features emerging from a web of fine brown hair. It was impossible to tell her age, save that she was not old. Neither could I tell whether she had been attractive; there was no beauty of bone, but animation might have flushed the round cheeks and lent her deepset eyes a sparkle men might have found pretty. One man had, I thought. Pretty enough, anyway.
The men were murmuring together, bent over the still form. Mr. Campbell turned now to me, wearing a slight frown beneath