Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [364]
How would it be? she wondered. She had wondered the same thing a hundred times, and a hundred times imagined different scenes: what she would say, what he would say—would he be glad to see her? She hoped so; and yet he would be a stranger. Likely he would bear no resemblance at all to the man of her imagination. With some difficulty, she fought back the memory of Laoghaire’s voice: A liar and a cheat … Her mother hadn’t thought so.
“ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’ ” she murmured to herself. She had come into the town of Cross Creek itself; the scattered houses thickened, and the dirt track widened into a cobbled street, lined with shops and larger houses. There were people about, but it was the hottest part of the afternoon, when the air lay still and heavy on the town. Those who could be, were inside in the shade.
The road curved out, following the riverbank. A small sawmill stood by itself on a point of land, and near it, a tavern. She’d ask there, she decided. Hot as it was, she could use something to drink.
She patted the pocket of her coat, to be sure she had money. She felt instead the prickly outline of a horse chestnut’s hull, and pulled her hand away as though she’d been burned.
She felt hollow again, in spite of the food she’d eaten. Lips pressed tight together, she tethered the mule and ducked into the dark refuge of the tavern.
The room was empty save for the landlord, perched in somnolence on his stool. He roused himself at her step, and after the usual goggle of surprise at her appearance, served her beer and gave her courteous directions to the courthouse.
“Thank you.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead with a coat sleeve—even inside, the heat was stifling.
“You’ll have come for the trial, then?” the landlord ventured, still looking at her curiously.
“Yes—well, not really. Whose trial is it?” she asked, belatedly realizing that she had no idea.
“Oh, it’ll be Fergus Fraser,” the man said, as though assuming that naturally everyone knew who Fergus Fraser was. “Assault on an officer of the Crown is the charge. He’ll be acquitted, though,” the landlord went on matter-of-factly. “Jamie Fraser’s come down from the mountain for him.”
Brianna choked on her beer.
“You know Jamie Fraser?” she asked breathlessly, swabbing at the spilled foam on her sleeve.
The landlord’s brows went up.
“Wait but a moment and you’ll know him, too.” He nodded at a pewter tankard full of beer, sitting on the nearby table. She hadn’t noticed it when she came in. “He went out the back, just as you came in. He—hey!” He fell back with a cry of surprise as she dropped her own tankard on the floor, and shot out the back door like a bat out of hell.
The light outside was dazzling after the taproom’s gloom. Brianna blinked, eyes tearing at the shafts of sun that stabbed through the shifting greens of a screen of maples. Then a movement caught her eye, below the flickering leaves.
He stood in the shade of the maples, half turned away from her, head bent in absorption. A tall man, long-legged, lean and graceful, with his shoulders broad under a white shirt. He wore a faded kilt in pale greens and browns, casually rucked up in front as he urinated against a tree.
He finished and, letting the kilt fall, turned toward the post house. He saw her then, standing there staring at him, and tensed slightly, hands half curling. Then he saw past her men’s clothes, and the look of wary suspicion changed at once to surprise as he realized that she was a woman.
There was no doubt in her mind, from the first glimpse. She was at once surprised and not surprised at all; he was not quite what she had imagined—he seemed smaller, only man-sized—but his face had the lines of her own; the long, straight nose and stubborn jaw, and the slanted cat-eyes, set in a frame of solid bone.