Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [461]
Alexandre was gone. He lay alone under the tattered deerskin, very cold.
“Alexandre?” he whispered hoarsely. “Père Ferigault?”
“I am here.” The young priest’s voice was soft, somehow remote, though he sat no more than a yard away.
Roger rose up on one elbow, squinting. Once the sleep had left his eyes, he could see dimly. Alexandre was sitting cross-legged, his back very straight, his face turned up to the square of the smokehole overhead.
“Are you all right?” One side of the priest’s neck was stained dark with blood, though his face—what Roger could see of it—seemed serene.
“They will kill me soon. Perhaps today.”
Roger sat up, clutching the deerskin to his chest. He was already cold; the calm tone of this froze him.
“No,” he said, and had to cough to clear his throat of soot. “No, they won’t.”
Alexandre didn’t bother contradicting him. Didn’t move. He sat naked, oblivious of the cold morning air, looking up. At last he lowered his gaze, and turned his head toward Roger.
“Will you hear my confession?”
“I’m not a priest.” Roger scrambled to his knees and scuffled across the floor, the skin held awkwardly before him. “Here, you’ll freeze. Get under this.”
“It does not matter.”
Roger wasn’t sure whether he meant being cold didn’t matter, or whether Roger’s not being a priest didn’t matter. He laid a hand on Alexandre’s bare shoulder. Whether it mattered or not, the man was cold as ice.
Roger sat down next to Alexandre, as close as could be managed, and spread the skin over them both. Roger could feel his own skin ripple into gooseflesh where the other man’s icy skin touched him, but it didn’t trouble him; he leaned closer, wanting urgently to give Alexandre some of his own warmth.
“Your father,” Alexandre said. He had turned his head; his breath touched Roger’s face, and his eyes were dark holes in his face. “You told me he was a priest.”
“A minister. Yes, but I’m not.”
He sensed, rather than saw, the other’s small gesture of dismissal.
“In time of need, any man may do the office of a priest,” Alexandre said. Cold fingers touched Roger’s thigh, briefly. “Will you hear my confession?”
“If that’s—yes, if you like.” He felt awkward, but it couldn’t hurt, and if it helped the other at all … The hut, and the village outside, were quiet around them. There was no sound but the wind in the pine trees.
He cleared his throat. Did Alexandre mean to begin, or was he to say something first?
As though the sound had been a signal, the Frenchman turned to face him, bowing his head so the soft light smoothed the gold hair of his crown.
“Bless me, brother, for I have sinned,” Alexandre said in a low voice. And with his head bowed, hands folded in his lap, he made confession.
Sent out from Detroit with an escort of Hurons, he had ventured down the river as far as the settlement of Ste. Berthe de Ronvalle, to relieve the elderly priest in charge of the mission, whose health had broken down.
“I was happy there,” Alexandre said, in the half-dreaming voice that men use for events that have taken place decades ago. “It was a wild place, but I was very young, and ardent in my faith. I welcomed hardship.”
Young? The priest couldn’t be much older than himself.
Alexandre shrugged, dismissing the past.
“I spent two years with the Huron, and converted many. Then I went with a group of them to Ft. Stanwix, where there was a great gathering of the tribes of the region. There I met Kennyanisi-t’ago, a war chief of the Mohawk. He heard me preach, and being moved of the Holy Spirit, invited me to return with him to his village.”
The Mohawk were notoriously wary of conversion; it had seemed a heaven-sent chance. So Père Ferigault had traveled down the river by canoe, in company with Kennyanisi-t’ago and his warriors.
“That was my first sin,” he said quietly. “Pride.” He lifted one finger to Roger, as though suggesting that he keep count. “Still, God was with me.” The Mohawk had sided with the English during the recent French and Indian War, and were more than suspicious of the young French priest. He had persevered, learning the