Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [74]
“Aye, ye don’t care! That’s the true pity of it—that ye havena the grace even to feel shame for your ignorance!”
There was a charged silence after this, broken only by the soft splash of Troklus’s pole in the bow. I peeked around the corner, to see Jamie glaring at his nephew, who looked abashed. Ian glanced at me, coughed and cleared his throat.
“Well, I’ll tell ye, Uncle Jamie, if I thought shame would help, I wouldna scruple to blush.”
He looked so apologetically hangdog that I couldn’t help laughing. Jamie turned, hearing me, and his scowl faded slightly.
“Ye’re not a bit of help, Sassenach,” he said. “You’ve the Latin, have ye not? Being a physician, ye must. Perhaps I should leave his Latin schooling to you, aye?”
I shook my head. While it was more or less true that I could read Latin—badly and laboriously—I didn’t fancy trying to cram the ragbag remnants of my education into Ian’s head.
“All I remember is Arma virumque cano.” I glanced at Ian and translated, grinning. “My arm got bit off by a dog.”
Ian burst into giggles, and Jamie gave me a look of profound disillusion.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. While Jamie and Ian didn’t resemble each other in any physical respect beyond height, both had thick hair and the habit of running a hand through it when agitated or thoughtful. It looked to have been a stressful lesson—both of them looked as though they’d been pulled backward through a hedgerow.
Jamie smiled wryly at me, then turned back to Ian, shaking his head.
“Ah, well. I’m sorry to bark at ye, Ian, truly. But ye’ve a fine mind, and I shouldna like to see ye waste it. God, man, at your age, I was in Paris, already starting in to study at the Université!”
Ian stood looking down into the water that swirled past the side of the ship in smooth brown riffles. His hands rested on the rail; big hands, broad-backed and browned by the sun.
“Aye,” he said. “And at my age, my own father was in France, too. Fighting.”
I was a bit startled to hear this. I had known that the elder Ian had soldiered in France for a time, but not that he had gone so early for a soldier—nor stayed so long. Young Ian was just fifteen. The elder Ian had served as a foreign mercenary from that age, then, until the age of twenty-two; when a cannon blast had left him with a leg so badly shattered by grapeshot that it had been amputated just below the knee—and he had come home for good.
Jamie looked at his nephew for a moment, frowning slightly. Then he came to stand beside Ian, leaning backward, hands on the rail to balance himself.
“I ken that, aye?” Jamie said quietly. “For I followed him, four years later, when I was outlawed.”
Ian looked up at that, startled.
“Ye were together there in France?”
There was a slight breeze caused by our movement, but it was still a hot day. Perhaps the temperature decided him that it was better to let the subject of higher learning drop for a moment, for Jamie nodded, lifting the thick tail of his hair to cool his neck.
“In Flanders. For more than a year, before Ian was wounded and sent home. We fought wi’ a regiment of Scots mercenaries then—under Fergus mac Leodhas.”
Ian’s eyes were alight with interest.
“Is that where Fergus—our Fergus—got his name, then?”
His uncle smiled.
“Aye, I named him for mac Leodhas; a bonny man, and a great soldier, forbye. He thought weel o’ Ian. Did your Da never speak to you of him?”
Ian shook his head, his brow slightly clouded.
“He’s never said a thing to me. I—I kent he’d lost his leg fighting in France—Mam told me that, when I asked—but he wouldna say a word about it, himself.”
With Dr. Rawlings’s description of amputation vivid in my mind, I thought it likely that the elder Ian hadn’t wanted to recall the occasion.
Jamie shrugged, plucking the sweat-damp shirt away from his chest.
“Aye, well. I suppose he meant to put that time behind him, once he’d come home and settled at Lallybroch. And then …” He hesitated, but Ian was insistent.
“And then what, Uncle Jamie?”
Jamie glanced at his nephew, and one side of his mouth curled up.