The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [202]
“God’s judgment, d’ye think, Sassenach?”
“Not entirely God’s, I don’t think,” I said, my voice lowered so as not to carry to the kitchen below. I reached up and took the candlestick from him. “Look.”
A flask of water and a plate of bread, hard and tinged with blue mold, stood in the shadows near Beardsley’s head; orts and bits of gluey, half-chewed bread covered the floor nearby. She had fed him—enough to keep him alive. Yet I had seen great quantities of food in that front room as we passed—hanging hams, barrels of dried fruit and salt fish and sauerkraut.
There were bundles of furs, jugs of oil, piles of woolen blankets—and yet the master of those goods lay here in the dark, starved and shivering beneath a single sheet of linen.
“Why did she not just let him die, I wonder?” Jamie asked softly, eyes fixed on the moldy bread. Beardsley gargled and growled at this; his open eye rolled angrily, tears running down his face and snot bubbling from his nose. He flailed and grunted, arching his body in frustration, collapsing with a meaty thud that shook the boards of the loft.
“He can understand you, I think. Can you?” I addressed this remark to the sick man, who gobbled and drooled in a manner that made it clear that he understood at least that he was being spoken to.
“As to why . . .”
I gestured toward Beardsley’s legs, moving the candle slowly above them. Some of the sores were indeed compression sores, caused by lying helpless for a long time. Others were not. Parallel slashes, clearly made by a knife, showed black and clotted on one massive thigh. The shin was decorated with a regular line of ulcerations, angry red wounds rimmed with black and oozing. Burns, left to fester.
Jamie gave a small grunt at the sight, and glanced over his shoulder, toward the ladder. The sound of a door opening came from below, and a cold draft blew up into the loft, making the candle flame dance wildly. The door shut, and the flame steadied.
“I can make shift to lower him, I think.” Jamie lifted the candle, assessing the beams overhead. “A sling, perhaps, with a rope put over yon beam there. Is it all right to move him?”
“Yes,” I said, but I wasn’t paying attention. Bending over the sick man’s legs, I had caught a whiff of something that I hadn’t smelled in a long, long time—a very bad and sinister stink.
I hadn’t encountered it often, but even once would have been enough; the pungent smell of gas gangrene is strikingly memorable. I didn’t want to say anything that might alarm Beardsley—if he was capable of understanding—so instead, I patted him reassuringly and stood up to go and fetch the candle from Jamie for a better look.
He gave it to me, leaning close to murmur in my ear as he did so.
“Can ye do aught for him, Sassenach?”
“No,” I said, equally low-voiced. “Not for the apoplexy, that is. I can treat the sores and give him herbs against fever—that’s all.”
He stood for a moment, looking at the humped figure in the shadows, now quiescent. Then he shook his head, crossed himself, and went quickly down the ladder to hunt a rope.
I went slowly back to the sick man, who greeted me with a thick “Haughhh” and a restless thumping of one leg, like a rabbit’s warning. I knelt by his feet, talking soothingly of nothing in particular, while I held the light close to examine them. The toes. All the toes on his dead foot had been burned, some only blistered, others burned nearly to the bone. The first two toes had gone quite black, and a greenish tinge spread over the upper aspect of the foot nearby.
I was appalled—as much by the thought of what might have led to this as by the action itself. The candle wavered; my hands were shaking, and not only with cold. I was not only horrified by what had happened here; I was also worried by the immediate prospects. What on earth were we to do about these wretched people?
Plainly we couldn’t take Beardsley with us—just as plainly, he could not be left here, under the care of his wife. There were