The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [209]
“No,” he said, in a voice so hoarse I could scarcely hear him. “She’s still wi’ the goats. I daresay it’s warm in there.”
I eyed him uneasily. Grave-digging is hard work; his shirt was clinging to his body, soaked through in spite of the coldness of the day, and his face was flushed—with labor, I hoped, rather than fever. His fingers were white and as stiff as mine, though; it took a visible effort for him to uncurl them from the handle of the shovel.
“Surely that’s deep enough,” I said, surveying his work. I would myself have settled for the shallowest of gouges in the soft earth, but slipshod work was never Jamie’s way. “Do stop, Jamie, and change your shirt at once. You’re wringing wet; you’ll catch a terrible chill.”
He didn’t bother arguing, but took up the spade and carefully neatened the corners of the hole, shaping the sides to keep them from crumbling inward.
The shadows under the pine trees were growing thick, and the chickens had all gone to roost, feathery blobs perched in the trees like bunches of brown mistletoe. The forest birds had fallen silent, too, and the shadow of the house fell long and cold across the new grave. I hugged my elbows, and shivered at the quiet.
Jamie tossed the shovel onto the ground with a clunk, startling me. He climbed up out of the hole, and stood still for a minute, eyes closed, swaying with weariness. Then he opened his eyes and smiled tiredly at me.
“Let’s finish, then,” he said.
WHETHER THE OPEN DOOR had indeed allowed the deceased’s spirit to flee, or whether it was only that Jamie was with me, I felt no hesitation in entering the house now. The fire had gone out, and the kitchen was cold and dim, yet there was no sense of anything evil within. It was simply . . . empty.
Mr. Beardsley’s mortal remains rested peacefully under one of his own trade blankets, mute and still. Empty, too.
Mrs. Beardsley had declined to assist with the formalities—or even to enter the house, so long as her husband’s body remained inside—so I swept the hearth, kindled a new fire, and coaxed it into reluctant life, while Jamie took care of the mess in the loft. By the time he came down again, I had turned to the main business at hand.
Dead, Beardsley seemed much less grotesque than he had in life; the twisted limbs were relaxed, the air of frantic struggle gone. Jamie had placed a linen towel over the head, though when I peeked beneath it, I could see that there was no gory mess to deal with; Jamie had shot him cleanly through the blind eye, and the ball had not burst the skull. The good eye was closed now, the blackened wound left staring. I laid the towel gently back over the face, its symmetry restored in death.
Jamie climbed down the ladder, and came quietly to stand behind me, touching my shoulder briefly.
“Go and wash,” I said, gesturing behind me to the small kettle of water I had hung over the fire to heat. “I’ll manage here.”
He nodded, stripped off his sodden, filthy shirt, and dropped it on the hearth. I listened to the small, homely noises he made as he washed. He coughed now and then, but his breathing sounded somewhat easier than it had outside in the cold.
“I didna ken it might be that way,” he said from behind me. “I thought an apoplexy would kill a man outright.”
“Sometimes that’s so,” I said, a little absently, frowning as I concentrated on the job at hand. “Most often that’s the way of it, in fact.”
“Aye? I never thought to ask Dougal, or Rupert. Or Jenny. Whether my father—” The sentence stopped abruptly, as though he had swallowed it.
Ah. I felt a small jolt of realization in my solar plexus. So that was it. I hadn’t remembered, but he had told me of it, years before, soon after we were married. His father had seen Jamie flogged at Fort William, and under the shock of it, had suffered an apoplexy and died. Jamie, wounded and ill, had been spirited away from the Fort and gone into exile. He had not been told of his father’s death until weeks later—had no chance of farewell, had been able neither to bury his father