Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [18]
The scratching sounds ceased, and he took away the cupped hand that had shielded the newborn flame. The flame strengthened and lit his face from below, gilding the planes of high cheekbones and forehead, and shadowing the deep-set orbits of his eyes.
He lifted the candle, surveying the looming grave markers, eerie as a circle of standing stones.
“Lumen Christi,” he said softly, inclining his head toward a granite pillar surmounted with a cross, “et requiescat in pace, amice.” The half-mocking note had left his voice; he spoke with complete seriousness, and I felt at once oddly comforted, as though some watchful presence had withdrawn.
He smiled at me then, and handed me the candle.
“See can ye find a bit of wood for a torch, Sassenach,” he said. “Ian and I will take it in turns to dig.”
I was no longer nervous, but still felt like a grave robber, standing under a pine tree with my torch, watching Young Ian and Jamie take their turns in the deepening pit, their naked backs gleaming with sweat in the torchlight.
“Medical students used to pay men to steal fresh bodies from churchyards,” I said, handing my soiled kerchief to Jamie as he hauled himself out of the hole, grunting with effort. “That was the only way they could practice dissection.”
“Did they?” Jamie said. He wiped the sweat from his face and gave me a quick, wry glance. “Or do they?”
Luckily, it was too dark for Ian to notice my flush, despite the torchlight. It wasn’t the first slip I had made, nor was it likely to be the last, but most such inadvertencies resulted in nothing more than a quizzical glance, were they noticed at all. The truth simply was not a possibility that would occur to anyone.
“I imagine they do it now,” I admitted. I shivered slightly at the thought of confronting a freshly exhumed and unpreserved body, still smeared with the dirt of its desecrated grave. Cadavers embalmed and laid on a stainless steel surface were not particularly pleasant either, but the formality of their presentation served to keep the corruptive realities of death at some small distance.
I exhaled strongly through my nose, trying to rid myself of odors, imagined and remembered. When I breathed in, my nostrils were filled with the smell of damp earth and hot pitch from my pine torch, and the fainter, cooler echo of live scent from the pines overhead.
“They take paupers and criminals from the prisons, too.” Young Ian, who had evidently heard the exchange, if not understood it, took the opportunity to stop for a moment, wiping his brow as he leaned on the shovel.
“Da told me about one time he was arrested, when they took him to Edinburgh, and kept him in the Tolbooth. He was in a cell wi’ three other men, and one of them a fellow with the consumption, who coughed something dreadful, keeping the rest awake all night and all day. Then one night the coughing stopped, and they kent he was dead. But Da said they were so tired, they couldna do more than say a Pater Noster for his soul, and fall asleep.”
The boy paused and rubbed an itching nose.
“Da said he woke quite sudden wi’ someone clutching his legs and another someone takin’ him by the arms, liftin’ him up. He kicked and cried out, and the one who had his arms screeched and dropped him, so that he cracked his head on the stones. He sat up rubbin’ his pate and found himself staring at a doctor from the hospital and two fellows he’d brought along to carry awa’ the corpse to the dissecting room.”
Ian grinned broadly at the recollection, wiping his sweat-soaked hair out of his face.
“Da said he wasna sure who was most horrified, him or the fellows who’d got the wrong body. He did say as the doctor seemed regretful, though—said Da would have made a more interesting specimen, what wi’ his leg stump and all.”
Jamie laughed, stretching his arms to ease his shoulders. With face and torso streaked with red dirt, and his hair bound back with a kerchief round his forehead, he looked disreputable as any grave robber.
“Aye, I mind that story,” he said. “Ian did say