The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [235]
“I suppose so,” I said slowly. “So she’ll be a rather well-to-do little girl, won’t she?”
“Aye, and she’s just shit herself. Could ye not have done that before I’d put ye on a fresh clout?” he demanded of the child. Unfazed by the scolding, the little girl blinked sleepily at him and gave a soft belch.
“Oh, well,” he said, resigned. He shifted himself to better shelter her from the wind, lifted the coverings briefly, and wiped a smear of blackish slime deftly off the budlike privates.
The child seemed healthy, though rather undersized; she was no bigger than a large doll, her stomach bulging slightly with milk. That was the immediate difficulty; small as she was, and with no body fat for insulation, she would die of hypothermia within a very short time, unless we could keep her warm as well as fed.
“Don’t let her get chilled.” I put my hands in my armpits to warm them, in preparation for picking up the child.
“Dinna fash yourself, Sassenach. I must just wipe her wee bum and then—” He stopped, frowning.
“What’s this, Sassenach? Is she damaged, d’ye think? Perhaps yon silly woman dropped her?”
I leaned close to look. He held the baby’s feet up in one hand, a wad of soiled cotton lint in the other. Just above the tiny buttocks was a dark bluish discoloration, rather like a bruise.
It wasn’t a bruise. It was, though, an explanation of sorts.
“She isn’t hurt,” I assured him, pulling another of Mrs. Beardsley’s discarded shawls up to shelter her daughter’s bald head. “It’s a Mongol spot.”
“A what?”
“It means the child is black,” I explained. “African, I mean, or partly so.” Jamie blinked, startled, then bent to peer into the shawl, frowning.
“No, she isn’t. She’s as pale as ye are yourself, Sassenach.”
That was quite true; the child was so white as to seem devoid of blood.
“Black children don’t usually look black at birth,” I explained to him. “In fact, they’re often quite pale. The pigmentation of the skin begins to develop some weeks later. But they’re often born with this faint discoloration of the skin at the base of the spine—it’s called a Mongol spot.”
He rubbed a hand over his face, blinking away snowflakes that tried to settle on his lashes.
“I see,” he said slowly. “Aye, well, that explains a bit, does it not?”
It did. The late Mr. Beardsley, whatever else he might have been, had assuredly not been black. The child’s father had been. And Fanny Beardsley, knowing—or fearing—that the child she was about to bear would reveal her as an adulteress, had thought it better to abandon the child and flee before the truth was revealed. I wondered whether the mysterious father had had anything to do with what had happened to Mr. Beardsley, for that matter.
“Did she know for sure that the father was a Negro, I wonder?” Jamie touched the small underlip, now showing a tinge of pink, gently with one finger. “Or did she never see the child at all? For after all, she must have given birth in the dark. If she had seen it looked white, perhaps she would ha’ chosen to brazen it out.”
“Perhaps. But she didn’t. Who do you suppose the father can have been?” Isolated as the Beardsleys’ farm had been, I couldn’t imagine Fanny having the opportunity to meet very many men, other than the Indians who came to trade. Did Indian babies perhaps have Mongol spots? I wondered.
Jamie glanced bleakly around at the desolate surroundings, and scooped the child up into his arms.
“I dinna ken, but I shouldna think he’ll be hard to spot, once we’ve reached Brownsville. Let’s go, Sassenach.”
JAMIE RELUCTANTLY DECIDED to leave the goats behind, in the interest of reaching shelter and sustenance for the child as quickly as possible.
“They’ll be fine here for a bit,” he said, scattering the rest of the hay for them. “The nannies wilna leave the auld fellow—and ye’re no going anywhere for the present, are ye, a bhalaich?” He scratched Hiram between the horns in farewell, and we left to a chorus of protesting mehs, the goats having grown used to our company.
The weather was worsening by the moment; as