The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [254]
“Christ. What then?”
“Well, Billy was screaming—he didn’t break anything, but he banged his head pretty hard—and Mrs. Bug shot out of the kitchen with her broom, hollering because she thought we were being attacked by Indians, and Mrs. Chisholm went to find Mrs. MacLeod and started yelling from the privy, and . . . well, anyway, the geese came over in the middle of all of it, and Mrs. Bug looked up at the ceiling with her eyes popping, then said ‘Geese!’ so loud that everybody stopped yelling, and she ran into Da’s study and came back with the fowling piece and shoved it at me.”
She had relaxed a little with the telling. She snorted, and settled back against him.
“I was so mad, I just really wanted to kill something. And there were a lot of them—the geese—you could hear them calling all across the sky.”
He had seen the geese, too. Black V-shapes, flexing in the winds of the upper air, arrowing their way through the winter sky. Heard them calling, with a strange feeling of loneliness at the heart, and wished she were beside him there.
Everyone had rushed out to watch; the wild Chisholm children and a couple of the half-wild Chisholm dogs went scampering through the trees with whoops and barks of excitement, to retrieve the fallen birds, while Brianna shot and reloaded, as quickly as she could.
“One of the dogs got one, and Toby tried to wrestle it away, and the dog bit him, and he was running around and around the yard screaming that his finger was bitten off, and there was blood all over him, and nobody could make him stop so we could see whether it was, and Mama wasn’t here, and Mrs. Chisholm was down by the creek with the twins . . .”
She was stiffening again, and he could see the hot blood rising once more, flushing the back of her neck. He tightened his hold on her waist.
“Was his finger bitten off, then?”
She stopped and took a deep breath, then looked round at him over her shoulder, the color fading slightly from her face.
“No. The skin wasn’t even broken; it was goose blood.”
“Well, so. Ye did well, didn’t you? The larder full, not a finger lost—and the house still standing.”
He’d meant it as a joke, and was surprised to feel her heave a deep sigh, a little of the tension going out of her.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice held a note of undeniable satisfaction. “I did. All present and accounted for—and everybody fed. With minimal bloodshed,” she added.
“Well, it’s true what they say about omelettes and eggs, aye?” He laughed and bent to kiss her, then remembered his beard. “Oh—sorry. I’ll go and shave, shall I?”
“No, don’t.” She turned as he released her, and brushed a fingertip across his jaw. “I sort of like it. Besides, you can do that later, can’t you?”
“Aye, I can.” He bent his head and kissed her gently, but thoroughly. Was that it, then? She’d only wanted him to say that she’d done well, left on her own to run the place? He was thinking she deserved it, if so. He’d known she hadn’t been only sitting by the hearth singing cradle songs to Jemmy in his absence—but he hadn’t envisioned the gory details.
The smell of her hair and the musk of her body was all round him, but breathing deep to get more of it, he realized that the room was fragrant with juniper and balsam, too, and the mellow scent of beeswax candles. Not just one; there were three of them, set in candlesticks about the room. Normally, she would have lit a rush dip, saving the valuable candles, but the small room glowed now with soft gold light, and he realized that the bloom of it had lit them through their lovemaking, leaving him with memories of russet and ivory and the gold down that covered her like a lion’s pelt, the shadowed crimson and purple of her secret places, the dark of his skin on the paleness of hers—memories that glowed vivid against white sheets in his mind.
The floor was clean—or had been—its white-pine boards scrubbed, and the corners strewn with dried rosemary. He could see the tumbled bed past her ear, and realized that she’d made it up with fresh linen and a new quilt. She’d taken trouble for his homecoming.