The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [267]
He spoke lightly, but my fingers had found the old scar under his hair. It was no more now than a thread, the welted gash healed to a hairbreadth line. Still, it had been an eight-inch wound, laid open with an ax. It had nearly killed him at the time, I knew; he had lain near death in a French abbey for four months, and suffered from crippling headaches for years.
“It was that? You mean that you . . . couldn’t hear music anymore, after you were hurt?”
His shoulders lifted briefly in a shrug.
“I hear no music but the sound of drums,” he said simply. “I’ve the rhythm of it still, but the tune is gone.”
I stopped, my hands on his shoulders, and he turned to look back at me, smiling, trying to make a joke of it.
“Dinna be troubled for it, Sassenach; it’s no great matter. I didna sing well even when I could hear it. And Dougal didna kill me, after all.”
“Dougal? You do think it was Dougal, then?” I was surprised at the certainty in his voice. He had thought at the time that it might perhaps have been his uncle Dougal who had made the murderous attack upon him—and then, surprised by his own men before being able to finish the job, had pretended instead to have found him wounded. But there had been no evidence to say for sure.
“Oh, aye.” He looked surprised, too, but then his face changed, realizing.
“Oh, aye,” he said again, more slowly. “I hadna thought—you couldna tell what he said, could you? When he died, I mean—Dougal.” My hands were still resting on his shoulders, and I felt an involuntary shiver run through him. It spread through my hands and up my arms, raising the hairs all the way to the back of my neck.
As clearly as though the scene took place before me now, I could see that attic room in Culloden House. The bits and pieces of discarded furniture, things toppled and rolling from the struggle—and on the floor at my feet, Jamie crouching, grappling with Dougal’s body as it bucked and strained, blood and air bubbling from the wound where Jamie’s dirk had pierced the hollow of his throat. Dougal’s face, blanched and mottled as his lifeblood drained away, eyes fierce black and fixed on Jamie as his mouth moved in Gaelic silence, saying . . . something. And Jamie’s face, as white as Dougal’s, eyes locked on the dying man’s lips, reading that last message.
“What did he say?” My hands were tight on his shoulders, and his face was turned away as my thumbs rose up under his hair to seek the ancient scar again.
“Sister’s son or no—I would that I had killed you, that day on the hill. For I knew from the beginning that it would be you or me.” He spoke calm and low-voiced, and the very emotionlessness of the words made the shudder pass again, this time from me to him.
It was quiet in the study. The sound of voices in the kitchen had died to a murmur, as though the ghosts of the past gathered there to drink and reminisce, laughing softly among themselves.
“So that was what you meant,” I said quietly. “When you said you’d made your peace with Dougal.”
“Aye.” He leaned back in his chair and reached up, his hands wrapping warmly round my wrists. “He was right, ken. It was him or me, and would have been, one way or the other.”
I sighed, and a small burden of guilt dropped away. Jamie had been fighting to defend me, when he killed Dougal, and I had always felt that death to be laid at my door. But he was right, Dougal; too much lay between them, and if that final conflict had not come then, on the eve of Culloden, it would have been another time.
Jamie squeezed my wrists, and turned in his chair, still holding my hands.
“Let the dead bury the dead, Sassenach,” he said softly. “The past is gone—the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.”
36
WORLDS UNSEEN
THE HOUSEHOLD WAS QUIET; it was the perfect opportunity for my experiments. Mr. Bug had gone to Woolam