Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [234]
I was no artist. I had learned to make clean clinical drawings, accurate pictures of limbs and bodies, but I lacked Brianna’s gift of bringing lines to life. The sketch as it stood was no more than an aide-mémoire; I could look at it and paint her face in memory. To try to do more—to conjure flesh out of the paper—would be to ruin that, and risk losing the image I held of her in my heart.
And would I conjure her in the flesh, if I could do it? No. That I would not; I would a thousand times rather think of her in the safety and comfort of her own time than wish her here amid the harshness and dangers of this one. But it didn’t mean that I didn’t miss her.
For the first time, I felt some small sympathy for Jocasta Cameron and her desire for an heir; someone to remain behind, to take her place; testimony that her life had not been lived in vain.
Twilight was rising beyond the window, from field and wood and river. People spoke of night falling, but it didn’t, really. Darkness rose, filling first the hollows, then shadowing the slopes, creeping imperceptibly up tree trunks and fenceposts as night swallowed the ground and rose up to join the greater dark of the star-spread sky above.
I sat staring out the window, watching the light change on the horses in the paddock; not so much fading as altering, so that everything—arched necks, round rumps, even single blades of grass—stood stark and clean, reality freed for one brief moment from the day’s illusions of sun and shadow.
Unseeing, I traced the line of the drawing with my finger, over and over, as the dark rose up around me and the realities of my heart stood clear in the dusky light. No, I would not wish Brianna here. But that didn’t mean I didn’t miss her.
I finished my notes eventually, and sat quietly for a moment. I should go and begin making supper, I knew, but the weariness of my ordeal still dragged at me, making me unwilling to move. All my muscles ached, and the bruise on my knee throbbed. All I really wanted to do was to crawl back into bed.
Instead, I picked up the skull, which I had set down next to my casebook on the table. I ran my finger gently over the rounded cranium. It was a thoroughly macabre desk ornament, I would admit that, but I felt rather attached to it, nonetheless. I had always found bones beautiful, of man or beast; stark and graceful remnants of life reduced to its foundations.
I thought suddenly of something I had not remembered in many years; a small dark closet of a room in Paris, hidden behind an apothecary’s shop. The walls covered with a honeycomb of shelves, each cell holding a polished skull. Animals of many kinds, from shrews to wolves, mice to bears.
And with my hand on the head of my unknown friend, I heard Master Raymond’s voice, as clear in memory as though he stood beside me.
“Sympathy?” he had said as I touched the high curve of a polished elk’s skull. “It is an unusual emotion to feel for a bone, madonna.”
But he had known what I meant. I knew he did, for when I asked him why he kept these skulls, he had smiled and said, “They are company, of a sort.”
I knew what he meant, too; for surely the gentleman whose skull I kept had been company for me, in a very dark and lonely place. Not for the first time, I wondered whether he had in fact had anything to do with the apparition I had seen on the mountain; the Indian with his face painted black.
The ghost—if that is what he was—had not smiled or spoken aloud. I hadn’t seen his teeth, which would be my only point of comparison with the skull I held—for I found that I was holding it, rubbing a thumb over the jagged edge of a cracked incisor. I lifted the skull to the light, examining it closely by the soft sunset light.
The teeth on the one side had been shattered; cracked and splintered as though he had been struck violently in the mouth, perhaps by a rock or a club