Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [457]
Roger cursed himself for helplessness; he would have given anything to assuage the other man’s pain, even for a moment. It wasn’t merely sympathy, and he knew it; Father Alexandre’s small, breathless sounds kept the knowledge of the mutilation fresh in Roger’s mind, and terror alive in his blood. If the priest could only sleep, the sounds would stop—and perhaps in the darkness, the horror would recede a bit.
For the first time, he thought he understood what it was that made Claire Randall tick; made her walk onto battlefields, to lay her hands on wounded men. To ease pain and death in another was to soothe the fear of it in oneself—and to soothe his own fear, he would do almost anything.
At last, unable to bear the whispered prayers and stifled whimpering any longer, he lay down beside the priest, and took Alexandre in his arms.
“Hush,” he said, his lips close to Père Alexandre’s head. He hoped he had the side with the ear. “Be still now. Reposez-vous.”
The priest’s lean body quivered against his own, the muscles knotted with cold and agony. Roger rubbed the man’s back briskly, chafed his palms over the chilled limbs, and pulled both tattered deerskins over them.
“You’ll be all right.” Roger spoke in English, aware that it didn’t matter what he said, only that he said something. “Here now, it’s all right. Yes, go on, then.” He talked as much to distract himself as the other man; the feel of Alexandre’s naked body was vaguely shocking—as much because it didn’t feel unnatural as because it did.
The priest clung to him, head pressed into his shoulder. He said nothing, but Roger could feel the wetness of tears against his skin. He made himself hug the priest tightly, rubbing up and down the spine with its small lumps of knobby bone, forcing himself to think only of stopping the terrible shaking.
“You could be a dog,” Roger said. “A mistreated stray of some kind. I’d do it if you were a dog, of course I would. No, I wouldn’t,” he muttered to himself. “Call the ruddy RSPCA, I expect.”
He patted Alexandre’s head, careful where his fingers went, cold with gooseflesh at the thought of touching that raw, bloody patch by inadvertence. The hair at the priest’s nape was lank with sweat, though the flesh of his neck and shoulders was like ice. His lower body was warmer, but not by much.
“Nobody’d treat a dog like this,” he muttered. “Fucking savages. Set the police onto them. Put their bloody pictures in the Times. Complain to my MP.”
A small ripple of something too frightened to be called laughter went through him. He gripped the priest fiercely, and rocked him to and fro in darkness.
“Reposez-vous, mon ami. C’est bien, là, c’est bien.”
55
CAPTIVITY II
River Run, March 1770
Brianna rolled the wet brush along the edge of the palette, squeezing out the excess turps to form a good point. She touched the point briefly to the viridian–cobalt mix and added a fine line of shadow to the river’s edge.
There were footsteps on the path behind her, coming from the house. She recognized the arrythmic double step; it was the Deadly Duo. She tensed slightly, fighting the urge to snatch the wet canvas and put it out of sight behind Hector Cameron’s mausoleum. She didn’t mind Jocasta, who often came to sit with her while she painted in the mornings, to discuss techniques of painting, grinding pigments, and the like. In fact, she welcomed her great-aunt’s company and treasured the older woman’s stories of her girlhood in Scotland, of Brianna’s grandmother, and of the other MacKenzies of Leoch. But when Jocasta brought her faithful Seeing-eye Dog along, it was a different matter.
“Good morning, Niece! Is it not too cold for you the morn?”
Jocasta halted, her own cloak drawn around her, and smiled at Brianna. If she hadn’t known better, she wouldn’t have realized her aunt’s blindness.
“No, it’s fine here; the … er … tomb blocks the wind.