Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [339]
It was some time before he made sense of Bonnet’s words, and realized, with a vague sense of amazement, that the man seemed to be recounting the story of his life, in a quiet, matter-of-fact sort of way.
Orphaned in Sligo at an early age, he had learned quickly to fend for himself, he said, working as a cabin boy aboard trading ships. But one winter, with ships scarce, he had found work ashore in Inverness, digging the foundation for a grand house that was building near the town.
“I was just seventeen,” he said. “The youngest of the crew of workmen. I could not say why it was they hated me. Mayhap it was my manner, for that was rough enough—or jealousy for my size and strength; they were an unchancy, whey-faced lot. Or maybe that the lasses smiled on me. Or maybe ’twas only that I was a stranger.
“Still, I knew well enough I was unpopular with them—little did I know quite how unpopular, though, until the day the cellar was finished and the foundation ready to be laid.”
Bonnet paused to draw on his cigar, lest it go out. He let out puffs of smoke from the corners of his mouth, white wisps that curled past his head into the greater white of the fog.
“The trenches were dug,” he went on, the cigar clenched between his teeth, “and the walls started; the great block of the cornerstone standin’ ready. I had gone to my supper, and was just walkin’ back to the place where I slept, when to my surprise I was caught up by a pair of the lads with whom I worked.
“They’d a bottle; they sat down on a wall and urged me to drink with them. I should’ve known better, for they were friendly, which they’d never been before. But I did drink, and drink again, and in no time at all I was reelin’ drunk, for I’d no head for liquor, havin’ never the money to buy strong drink. I was well fuddled by the time ‘twas full dark, and scarcely thought to pull away when they took me by the arms and hastened me down the lane. Then they seized me, tossed me over a half-built wall, and to my surprise, I found myself lyin’ in the damp dirt of the cellar I’d helped dig.
“All of them were there, the workmen. Another man was with them, too; one o’ them had a lantern, and when he held it up, I could see the man was Daft Joey. Daft Joey was a beggarman that lived beneath the bridge—he had nay teeth, and he ate rotten fish and floating dung from the river, and he stank worse than a blackbirder’s hold.
“I was so dazed with the whisky and the fall that I lay where I was, only half hearin’ them as they talked—or argued, rather, for the chief o’ the gang was angry that the two had brought me. The daftie would do, he said; a mercy to him, at that. But them that brought me said no, better me. Someone might miss the beggarman, they said. Then someone laughed and said aye, and they would not have to pay me my last week’s wages, and ’twas then I began to know they meant to kill me.
“They’d talked before, while we worked. A sacrifice, they said, for the foundation, lest the earth tremble and the walls collapse. But I had not listened—and if I had, would not have guessed that they meant any more than to chop the head off a cockerel and bury it, as was usual.”
He had not looked at Roger through this recital, his eyes instead fixed on the mist, as though the events he described were happening again, somewhere just beyond the white curtain of fog.
Roger’s clothing hung on him, clinging, wringing wet with mist and cold sweat. His stomach clenched, and the cesspool smell of the steerage might have been the stink of Daft Joey in the cellar.
“So they palavered for a bit,” Bonnet went on, “and the beggarman began to make noise, for he wanted more drink. And at last the chief said it was not worth so much talk, he would throw