The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [248]
Isaiah tightened both his lips and his trigger finger, and I held my breath. Jamie continued to look at him, his gaze a mixture of censure and pity. At last, the finger relaxed, and the pistol barrel sank, along with Isaiah’s eyes.
“I just got to see Ally, Colonel,” he said softly, looking at the ground.
I drew a deep breath, and looked up at Jamie. He hesitated, then nodded.
“All right, Sassenach. Go canny, aye?”
I nodded, and turned to slip into the house, hearing Jamie mutter something under his breath in Gaelic behind me, to the general effect that he must have lost his mind.
I wasn’t sure he hadn’t, though I had also felt the strength of Morton’s appeal. If any of the Browns happened to discover this rendezvous, though, there would be hell to pay—and it wouldn’t be only Morton who paid.
The floor inside was littered with sleeping bodies wrapped in blankets, though a few men still huddled round the hearth, gossiping and passing a jug of something spirituous among themselves. I looked carefully, but fortunately Richard Brown was not among them.
I made my way across the room, carefully stepping through and over the bodies on the floor, and peered into the bed that stood against the wall as I passed. Richard Brown and his wife were both curled up in it, sound asleep, nightcaps pulled well down over their respective ears, though the house was warm enough, what with all the trapped body heat.
There was only one place that Alicia Brown could be, and I pushed open the door to the loft stair, as quietly as I could. It made little difference; no one by the fire paid the slightest attention. One of the men appeared to be trying to get Hiram to drink from the jug, with some success.
By contrast to the room below, the loft was quite cold. This was because the small window was uncovered, and quite a lot of snow had drifted in, together with a freezing wind. Alicia Brown was lying in the little snowdrift under the window, stark naked.
I walked over and stood looking down at her. She lay stiffly on her back, arms folded over her chest. She was shivering, and her eyes were squinched shut with ferocious concentration. Obviously, she hadn’t heard my footsteps, over the noises from below.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” I inquired politely.
Her eyes popped open and she gave a small shriek. Then she clapped a hand over her mouth and sat up abruptly, staring at me.
“I’ve heard of a number of novel ways of inducing miscarriage,” I told her, picking up a quilt from the cot and dropping it over her shoulders, “but freezing to death isn’t one of them.”
“If I’m d-dead, I won’t need to m-m-miscarry,” she said, with a certain amount of logic. Nonetheless, she drew the quilt around her, teeth chattering.
“Scarcely the best means of committing suicide, either, I shouldn’t think,” I said. “Though I don’t mean to sound critical. Still, you can’t do it now; Mr. Morton is out in the lean-to and won’t go away until you come down to speak to him, so you’d better get up and put something on.”
Her eyes flew wide and she scrambled to her feet, her muscles so stiff with cold that she stumbled awkwardly and would have fallen, had I not grabbed her arm. She said nothing more, but dressed as quickly as her chilled fingers would allow, wrapping a thick cloak around herself.
Bearing in mind Jamie’s adjuration to “Go canny,” I sent her down the narrow stair alone. Alone, she would be merely assumed to be going to the privy—if anyone even noticed her departure. Both of us together might cause comment.
Left by myself in the darkened loft, I drew my own cloak around me and went to the narrow window to wait for the few minutes necessary before I could leave, too. I heard the soft thump of the door closing below, but couldn’t see Alicia from this high angle. Judging from her response to my summons, she didn’t intend to stab Isaiah to the heart, but heaven knew what either of them did intend.
The clouds were gone now, and the frozen landscape stretched before me, brilliant and ghostly under a setting moon. Across the road,