The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [135]
I unsaddled the mule, removing in the process two worn saddlebags half-filled with printed pamphlets, badly printed and crudely illustrated. I studied the illustration with some interest; it was a woodcut of several indignant and righteous-looking Regulators defying a group of officials, among whom was a squat figure I had no trouble identifying as David Anstruther; the caption didn’t mention him by name, but the artist had captured the Sheriff’s resemblance to a poisonous toad with remarkable facility. Had Husband taken to delivering the bloody things door-to-door? I wondered.
I turned the animals out into the paddock, dumped the hat and saddlebags by the porch, then trekked up the hill to the stable, a shallow cave that Jamie had walled with thick palisades. Brianna referred to it as the maternity ward, since the usual occupants were imminently expectant mares, cows, or sows.
I wondered what brought Hermon Husband here—and whether he was being followed. He owned a farm and a small mill, both at least two days’ ride from the Ridge; not a journey he would undertake simply for the pleasure of our company.
Husband was one of the leaders of the Regulation, and had been jailed more than once for the rabble-rousing pamphlets he printed and distributed. The most recent news I had heard of him was that he had been read out of the local Quaker meeting, the Friends taking a dim view of his activities, which they regarded as incitement to violence. I rather thought they had a point, judging from the pamphlets I’d read.
The door of the stable stood open, allowing the pleasantly fecund scents of straw, warm animals, and manure to drift out, along with a stream of similarly fecund words. Jamie, no Quaker, did believe in strong language, and was using rather a lot of it, albeit in Gaelic, which tends toward the poetic, rather than the vulgar.
I translated the current effusion roughly as, “May your guts twine upon themselves like serpents and your bowels explode through the walls of your belly! May the curse of the crows be upon you, misbegotten spawn of a lineage of dung flies!” Or words to that effect.
“Who are you talking to?” I inquired, putting my head round the stable door. “And what’s the curse of the crows?”
I blinked against the sudden dimness, seeing him only as a tall shadow against the piles of pale hay stacked by the wall. He turned, hearing me, and strode into the light from the door. He’d been running his hands through his hair; several strands were pulled from their binding, standing on end, and there were straws sticking out of it.
“Tha nighean na galladh torrach!” he said, with a ferocious scowl and a brief gesture behind him.
“White daughter of a bi—oh! You mean that blasted sow has done it again?”
The big white sow, while possessed of superior fatness and amazing reproductive capacity, was also a creature of low cunning, and impatient of captivity. She had escaped her brood pen twice before, once by the expedient of charging Lizzie, who had—wisely—screamed and dived out of the way as the pig barged past, and again by assiduously rooting up one side of the pen, lying in wait until the stable door was opened, and knocking me flat as she made for the wide-open spaces.
This time, she hadn’t bothered with strategy, but merely smashed out a board from her pen, then rooted and dug under the palisades, making an escape tunnel worthy of British prisoners-of-war in a Nazi camp.
“Aye, she has,” Jamie said, reverting to English now that his initial fury had subsided somewhat. “As for the curse o’ the crows, it depends. It might mean ye want the corbies to come down on a man’s fields and eat his corn. In this case, I had in mind the birds pecking out the evil creature’s eyes.”
“I suppose that would make her easier to catch,” I said, sighing. “How near is she to farrowing, do you think?”
He shrugged