Outlander - Diana Gabaldon [121]
“Brother…you haven’t a shance,” I said, and the spark went out.
14
A MARRIAGE TAKES PLACE
There was a low, beamed ceiling over me when I woke, and a thick quilt tucked tidily under my chin. I seemed to be clad only in my shift. I started to sit up to look for my clothes, but thought better of it halfway up. I eased myself very carefully back down, closed my eyes and held onto my head to prevent it from rolling off the pillow and bouncing on the floor.
I woke again, sometime later, when the door of the room opened. I cracked one eye cautiously. A wavering outline resolved itself into the dour figure of Murtagh, staring disapprovingly down at me from the foot of the bed. I closed the eye. I heard a muffled Scottish noise, presumably indicating appalled disgust, but when I looked again he was gone.
I was just sinking thankfully back into unconsciousness when the door opened again, this time to reveal a middle-aged woman I took to be the publican’s wife, carrying a ewer and basin. She bustled cheerily into the room and banged the shutters open with a crash that reverberated through my head like a tank collision. Advancing on the bed like a Panzer division, she ripped the quilt from my feeble grasp and tossed it aside, leaving me quaking and exposed.
“Come along then, me love,” she said. “We mun get ye ready now.” She put a hefty forearm behind my shoulders and levered me into a sitting position. I clutched my head with one hand, my stomach with the other.
“Ready?” I said, through a mouth filled with decayed moss.
The woman began briskly washing my face. “Och, aye,” she said. “Ye dinna want to miss yer own wedding, now, do ye?”
“Yes,” I said, but was ignored as she unceremoniously stripped off my shift and stood me in the middle of the floor for further intimate attentions.
A bit later I sat on the bed, fully dressed, feeling dazed and belligerent, but thanks to a glass of port supplied by the goodwife, at least functional. I sipped carefully at a second glass, as the woman tugged a comb through the thickets of my hair.
I jumped and shuddered, spilling the port, as the door crashed open once more. One damn thing after another, I thought balefully. This time it was a double visitation, Murtagh and Ned Gowan, wearing similar looks of disapprobation. I exchanged glares with Ned while Murtagh came into the room and walked slowly around the bed, surveying me from every angle. He returned to Ned and muttered something in a tone too low for me to hear. With a final glance of despair in my direction, he pulled the door shut behind them.
At last my hair was dressed to the woman’s satisfaction, swept back and pulled high in a knot at the crown, curls picked loose to tumble to the back, and ringlets in front of my ears. It felt as though my scalp were going to pop off from the tension of the strained-back hair, but the effect in the looking glass the woman provided was undeniably becoming. I began to feel slightly more human, and even brought myself to thank her for her efforts. She left me the looking glass, and departed, remarking that it was so lucky to be married in summer, wasn’t it, as I’d have plenty of flowers for my hair.
“We who are about to die,” I said to my reflection, sketching a salute in the glass. I collapsed on the bed, plastered a wet cloth over my face, and went back to sleep.
I was having a rather nice dream, something to do with grassy fields and wildflowers, when I became aware that what I had thought a playful breeze tugging at my sleeves was a pair of none-too-gentle hands. I sat up with a jerk, blindly flailing.
When I got my eyes open, I saw that my small chamber now resembled a Tube station, with faces wall-to-wall: Ned Gowan, Murtagh, the innkeeper, the innkeeper’s wife, and a lanky young man, who turned out to be the innkeeper’s son, with his arms full of assorted