Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [486]
“Have you ever seen my father with his shirt off?”
“Do you mean the scars on his back?”
She nodded.
He drummed his fingers restlessly on his knees, soundless on the fine broadcloth.
“Yes, I’ve seen them. I did that.”
Her head jerked back, eyes wide. The end of her nose was cherry-red, but the rest of her skin so pale that her hair and eyebrows seemed to have leached all the life from it.
“Not all of it,” he said, staring off into a bed of dead hollyhocks. “He’d been flogged before, which made it all the worse—that he knew what he was doing, when he did it.”
“Did … what?” she asked. Slowly, she rearranged herself on the bench, not so much turning toward him as flowing in her garments, like a cloud changing shape in the wind.
“I was the commander at Ardsmuir prison; did he tell you? No, I thought not.” He made an impatient gesture, brushing back the strands of fair hair that whipped across his face.
“He was an officer, a gentleman. The only officer there. He spoke for the Jacobite prisoners. We dined together, in my quarters. We played chess, we spoke of books. We had interests in common. We … became friends. And then … we were not.”
He stopped speaking.
She drew away from him a bit, distaste in her eyes.
“You mean—you had him flogged because he wouldn’t—”
“No, damn it, I did not!” He snatched the handkerchief and scrubbed angrily at his nose. He flung it down on the seat between them and glared at her. “How dare you suggest such a thing!”
“But you said yourself you did it!”
“He did it.”
“You can’t flog yourself!”
He started to reply, then snorted. He raised one brow at her, still angry, but with his feelings coming back under control.
“The hell you can’t. You’ve been doing it for months, according to what you’ve told me.”
“We aren’t talking about me.”
“Of course we are!”
“No, we’re not!” She leaned toward him, heavy brows drawn down. “What the hell do you mean, he did it?”
The wind was blowing from behind her, into his face. It made his eyes sting and water, and he looked away.
“What am I doing here?” he muttered to himself. “I must be mad to be talking with you in this manner!”
“I don’t care if you’re mad or not,” she said, and gripped him by the sleeve. “You tell me what happened!”
He pressed his lips tight together, and for a moment, she thought he wouldn’t. But he had already said too much to stop, and he knew it. His shoulders rose under his cloak and dropped, slumping in surrender.
“We were friends. Then … he discovered my feeling for him. We were no longer friends, by his choice. But that was not enough for him; he wished a final severance. And so he deliberately brought about an occasion so drastic that it must alter our relation irrevocably and prevent any chance of friendship between us. So he lied. During a search of the prisoners’ quarters, he claimed a piece of tartan publicly as his own. Possession was against the law, then—it still is, in Scotland.”
He drew a deep breath and let it out. He wouldn’t look at her, but kept his eyes focused on the ragged fringe of bare trees across the river, raw against the pale spring sky.
“I was the governor, charged with execution of the law. I was obliged to have him flogged. As he damn well knew I would be.”
He tilted his head back, resting it against the carved stone back of the bench. His eyes were closed against the wind.
“I could forgive his not wanting me,” he said, with quiet bitterness. “But I couldn’t forgive him for making me use him in that fashion. Not forcing me merely to hurt him, but to degrade him. He could not merely refuse to acknowledge my feeling; he must destroy it. It was too much.”
Bits of debris boiled past on the flood; storm-cracked twigs and branches, a broken board from the hull of a boat, wrecked somewhere upstream. Her hand covered his where it rested on his knee. It was slightly larger than his own, and warm from sheltering in her cloak.
“There was a reason. It wasn’t you. But it’s for him to tell you, if he wants to. You did forgive him, though,” she said quietly. “Why?”
He sat up then, and shrugged, but didn