The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [255]
“Hey,” he said softly in her ear. “I may be a fool, but I love you, aye?”
She sighed deeply, her breasts pushing against his bare chest, warm even through the cloth of shift and gown. They were firm; filling with milk, but not yet hard.
“Yeah, you are,” she said frankly, “but I love you too. And I’m glad you’re home.”
He laughed and let go. There was a branch of juniper tacked above the window, heavy with its clouded blue-green berries. He reached up and broke off a sprig, kissed it, and tucked it into the neck of her gown, between her breasts, as a token of truce—and apology.
“Merry Christmas. Now, what was it about the geese?”
She put a hand to the juniper sprig, a half-smile growing, then fading.
“Oh. Well. It’s not important. It’s just . . .” He followed the direction of her eyes, turned, and saw the sheet of paper, propped up behind the basin on the washstand.
It was a drawing, done in charcoal; wild geese against a stormy sky, striving through the air above a lash of wind-tossed trees. It was a wonderful drawing, and looking at it gave him the same odd feeling at the heart that hearing the geese themselves had done—half joy, half pain.
“Merry Christmas,” Brianna said softly, behind him. She came to stand beside him, wrapping a hand around his arm.
“Thanks. It’s . . . God, Bree, you’re good.” She was. He bent and kissed her, hard, needing to do something to lessen the sense of yearning that haunted the paper in his hand.
“Look at the other one.” She pulled a little away from him, still holding his arm, and nodded at the washstand.
He hadn’t realized there were two. The other drawing had been behind the first.
She was good. Good enough to chill the blood at his heart. The second drawing was in charcoal, too, the same stark blacks and whites and grays. In the first, she had seen the wildness of the sky, and put it down: yearning and courage, effort enduring in faith amid the emptiness of air and storm. In this, she had seen stillness.
It was a dead goose, hung by the feet, its wings half-spread. Neck limp and beak half-open, as though even in death it sought flight and the loud-calling company of its companions. The lines of it were grace, the details of feather, beak, and empty eyes exquisite. He had never seen anything so beautiful, nor so desolate, in his life.
“I drew that last night,” she said quietly. “Everybody was in bed, but I couldn’t sleep.”
She had taken a candlestick and prowled the crowded house, restless, going outside at last in spite of the cold, seeking solitude, if not rest, in the chill dark of the outbuildings. And in the smokeshed, by the light of the embers there, had been struck by the beauty of the hanging geese, their clear plumage black and white against the sooty wall.
“I checked to be sure Jemmy was sound asleep, then brought my sketch box down and drew, until my fingers were too cold to hold the charcoal anymore. That was the best one.” She nodded at the picture, her eyes remote.
For the first time, he saw the blue shadows in her face, and imagined her by candlelight, up late at night and all alone, drawing dead geese. He would have taken her in his arms then, but she turned away, going to the window, where the shutters had begun to bang.
The thaw had faded, to be followed by a freezing wind that stripped the last sere leaves from the trees and sent acorns and chestnut hulls sailing through the air to rattle on the roof like buckshot. He followed her, reached past her to draw in the shutters and fasten them against the bitter wind.
“Da told me stories, while I was—while I was waiting for Jemmy to be born. I wasn’t paying close attention”—the corner of her mouth quirked with wryness—“but a bit here and there stuck with me.”
She turned around then, and leaned against the shutters, hands gripping the sill behind her.
“He said when a hunter kills a greylag