The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [122]
“Well, don’t shoot him until we get home. I don’t want to walk the last mile or so in my bare feet.”
“Hey! Let that alone, ye bugger!”
He let go of Claire and turned to find Roger snatching a fistful of ragged-looking plants away from Gideon’s questing Roman nose. More plants—what was this mania for gathering? Claire was still panting from the accident, but leaned forward to see them, looking interested.
“What’s that you’ve got, Roger?”
“For Bree,” he said, holding them up for her inspection. “Are they the right kind?” To Jamie’s jaundiced eye, they looked like the yellowed tops of carrots gone to seed and left too long in the ground, but Claire fingered the mangy foliage, and nodded approval.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Very romantic!”
Jamie made a small tactful noise, indicating that they ought perhaps to be making their way, since Bree and the slower-moving tribe of Chisholms would be catching them up soon.
“Yes, all right,” Claire said, patting his shoulder in what he assumed she meant to be a soothing gesture. “Don’t snort; we’re going.”
“Mmphm,” he said, and bent to put a hand under her foot. Tossing her up into the saddle, he gave Gideon a “Don’t try it on, you bastard” look and swung up behind her.
“You’ll wait for the others, then, and bring them up?” Without waiting for Roger’s nod, Jamie reined around and set Gideon upon the trail again.
Mollified at being far in the lead, Gideon settled down to the job at hand, climbing steadily through the thickets of hornbeam and poplar, chestnut and spruce. Even so late in the year, some leaves still clung to the trees, and small bits of brown and yellow floated down upon them like a gentle rain, catching in the horse’s mane, resting in the loose, thick waves of Claire’s hair. It had come down in her precipitous descent, and she hadn’t bothered to put it up again.
Jamie’s own equanimity returned with the sense of progress, and was quite restored by the fortuitous finding of the hat he had lost, hanging from a white oak by the trail, as though placed there by some kindly hand. Still, he remained uneasy in his mind, and could not quite grasp tranquillity, though the mountain lay at peace all round him, the air hazed with blue and smelling of wood-damp and evergreens.
Then he realized, with a sudden jolt in the pit of his stomach, that the kitten was gone. There were itching furrows in the skin of his chest and abdomen, where it had climbed him in a frantic effort to escape, but it must have popped out the neck of his shirt and been flung off his shoulder in the mad career down the slope. He glanced from side to side, searching in the shadows under bushes and trees, but it was a vain hope. The shadows were lengthening, and they were on the main trail now, where he and Gideon had torn through the wood.
“Go with God,” he murmured, and crossed himself briefly.
“What’s that?” Claire asked, half-turning in the saddle.
“Nothing,” he said. After all, it was a wild cat, though a small one. Doubtless it would manage.
Gideon worked the bit, pecking and bobbing. Jamie realized that the tension in his hands was running through the reins once more, and consciously slackened his grip. He loosened his grip on Claire, too, and she took a sudden deep breath.
His heart was beating fast.
It was impossible for him ever to come home after an absence without a certain sense of apprehension. For years after the Rising, he had lived in a cave, approaching his own house only rarely, after dark and with great caution, never knowing what he might find there. More than one Highland man had come home to his place to find it burned and black, his family gone. Or worse, still there.
Well enough to tell himself not to imagine horrors; the difficulty was that he had no need of imagination—memory sufficed.
The horse dug with his haunches, pushing hard. No use to tell himself this was a new place; it was, with its own dangers. If there were no English soldiers in these mountains, there were still marauders. Those too shiftless to take root and fend for themselves,