The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [356]
“To see men hacked to death on a battlefield is one thing,” he’d said earlier in the evening, still arguing with me. “That’s war, and it’s honorable, cruel as it may be. But to take a blade and carve up a poor innocent like yon woman in cold blood . . .” He looked at me, eyes dark with troubled thought. “Ye’re sure ye must do it, Claire?”
“Yes, I am,” I had said, eyes fixed on the contents of the bag I was assembling. A large roll of lint wadding, to soak up fluids, small jars for organ samples, my largest bone saw, a couple of scalpels, a wicked pair of heavy-bladed shears, a sharp knife borrowed from the kitchen . . . it was a sinister-looking collection, to be sure. I wrapped the shears in a towel to prevent them clanking against the other implements, and put them in the bag, carefully marshaling my words.
“Look,” I said at last, raising my eyes to meet his. “There’s something wrong, I know it. And if Betty was killed, then surely we owe it to her to find that out. If you were murdered, wouldn’t you want someone to do whatever they could to prove it? To—to avenge you?”
He stood still for a long moment, eyes narrowed in thought as he looked down at me. Then his face relaxed, and he nodded.
“Aye, I would,” he said quietly. He picked up the bone saw, and began wrapping it with cloth.
He hadn’t protested further. He hadn’t asked me again whether I was sure. He had merely said firmly that if I was going to do it, he was coming with me, and that was all about it.
As for being sure, I wasn’t. I did have an abiding feeling that something was very wrong about this death, but I was less confident in my sense of what it was, with the cold moon sinking through an empty sky and wind brushing my cheeks with the touch of icy fingers.
Betty might have died only by accident, not malice. I could be wrong; perhaps it was a simple hemorrhage of an esophageal ulcer, the bursting of an aneurysm in the throat, or some other physiological oddity. Unusual, but natural. Was I doing this, in fact, only to try to vindicate my faith in my own powers of diagnosis?
The wind belled my cloak and I pulled it tighter around me, one-handed, stiffening my spine. No. It wasn’t a natural death, I knew it. I couldn’t have said how I knew it, but fortunately Jamie hadn’t asked me that.
I had a brief flash of memory; Joe Abernathy, a jovial smile of challenge on his face, reaching into a cardboard box full of bones, saying, “I just want to see can you do it to a dead person, Lady Jane?”
I could; I had. He had handed me a skull, and the memory of Geillis Duncan shuddered through me like liquid ice.
“Ye needna do it, Claire.” Jamie’s hand tightened on mine. “I willna think ye a coward.” His voice was soft and serious, barely audible above the wind.
“I would,” I said, and felt him nod. That was the matter settled, then; he let go of my hand and went ahead of me, to open the gate.
He paused, and my dark-adapted eyes caught the clean sharp line of his profile as he turned his head, listening. The dark-lantern he carried smelled hot and oily, and a faint gleam escaping from its pierced-work panel sprinkled the cloth of his cloak with tiny flecks of dim light.
I glanced round myself, and looked back at the house. Late as it was, candles still burned in the back parlor, where the card games lingered on; I caught a faint murmur of voices as the wind changed, and a sudden laugh. The upper floors were mostly dark—save one window which I recognized as Jocasta’s.
“Your aunt’s awake late,” I whispered to Jamie. He turned and looked up at the house.
“Nay, it’s Duncan,” he said softly. “My aunt doesna need the light, after all.”
“Perhaps he’s reading to her in bed,” I suggested, trying to leaven the solemnity of our errand. A small derisive huff came