The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [253]
“. . . And you don’t even want to look at your son or hear anything about him—he’s learned to crawl, and I wanted to show you, but all you wanted was to go to bed, and you didn’t even bother to shave first . . .”
Roger felt as though he’d walked into the blades of a large, rapidly whirling fan. He scratched at his short beard, feeling guilty.
“I . . . ah . . . thought you wanted to—”
“I did!” She stamped her foot, raising a small cloud of dust from the disintegrated mud. “That hasn’t got anything to do with it!”
“All right.” He bent to get his shirt, keeping one eye warily on her. “So—you’re mad because I didn’t notice you’d washed the floor, is that it?”
“No!”
“No,” he repeated. He took a deep breath and tried again. “So, it is that I forgot it’s Christmas?”
“No!”
“You’re angry that I wanted to make love to you, even though you wanted to do it, too?”
“NO! Would you just shut up?”
Roger was strongly tempted to accede to this request, but a dogged urge to get to the bottom of things made him push on.
“But I don’t understand why—”
“I know you don’t! That’s the problem!”
She spun on her bare heel and stomped over to the chest that stood by the window. She flung back the lid with a bang, and began rummaging, with a series of small snorts and growls.
He opened his mouth, shut it again, and jerked the dirty shirt on over his head. He felt simultaneously irritated and guilty, a bad combination. He finished dressing in an atmosphere of charged silence, considering—and rejecting—possible remarks and questions, all of which seemed likely to inflame the situation further.
She had found her stockings, yanked them on, and gartered them with small savage movements, then thrust her feet into a pair of battered clogs. Now she stood at the open window, drawing deep breaths of air as though she were about to perform a set of RAF exercises.
His inclination was to escape while she wasn’t looking, but he couldn’t bring himself simply to leave, with something wrong—whatever in God’s name it was—between them. He could still feel the sense of closeness that they had shared, less than a quarter of an hour before, and couldn’t bring himself to believe that it had simply evaporated into thin air.
He walked up behind her, slowly, and put his hands on her shoulders. She didn’t whirl round and try either to stamp on his foot or to knee him in the stones, so he took the risk of kissing her lightly on the back of the neck.
“You were going to ask me something about geese.”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, relaxing just a little against him. Her anger seemed to have vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving him baffled but grateful. He put his arms round her waist, and pulled her back against him.
“Yesterday,” she said, “Mrs. Aberfeldy burnt the biscuits for breakfast.”
“Oh. Aye?”
“Mrs. Bug accused her of being too taken up with her daughter’s hair ribbons to pay attention to what she was doing. And what was she doing—Mrs. Bug said—putting blueberries into buttermilk biscuits in the first place?”
“Why shouldn’t one put blueberries into buttermilk biscuits?”
“I have no idea. But Mrs. Bug doesn’t think you should. And then Billy MacLeod fell down the stairs, and his mother was nowhere to be found—she went to the privy and got stuck—and—”
“She what?” Mrs. MacLeod was short and rather stout, but had a well-defined rear aspect, with an arse like two cannonballs in a sack. It was all too easy to envision such an accident befalling her, and Roger felt laughter gurgle up through his chest. He tried manfully to stifle it, but it emerged through his nose in a painful snort.
“We shouldn’t laugh. She had splinters.” Despite this rebuke, Brianna herself was quivering against him, tremors of mirth fracturing