The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [359]
“I saw a dead man sit up once,” he said, his tone as casual as my own.
“What, at a wake? He wasn’t really dead?”
“No, in a fire. And he was dead enough.”
I glanced up sharply. His voice was flat and matter-of-fact, but his face bore an inward look of deep abstraction; whatever he’d seen, he was seeing it again.
“After Culloden, the English burned the Highland dead on the field. We smelled the fires, but I didna see one, save when they took me out and put me in the wagon, to send me home.”
He had lain hidden under a layer of hay, nose pressed to a crack in the boards in order to breathe. The wagon driver had taken a circuitous route off the field, to avoid any questions from troops near the farmhouse, and at one point, had stopped for a moment to wait for a group of soldiers to move away.
“There was a fresh pyre burning, perhaps ten yards away; they’d set it alight no more than a short time before, for the clothes had only just begun to char. I saw Graham Gillespie lyin’ on the heap near me, and he was surely dead, for there was the mark of a pistol shot on his temple.”
The wagon had waited for what seemed a long time, though it was hard to tell, through the haze of pain and fever. But as he watched, he had seen Gillespie suddenly sit up amid the flames, and turn his head.
“He was lookin’ straight at me,” he said. “Had I been in my right mind, I expect I would ha’ let out a rare skelloch. As it was, it only seemed . . . friendly of Graham.” There was a hint of uneasy amusement in his voice. “I thought he was perhaps tellin’ me it wasna so bad, being dead. That, or welcoming me to hell, maybe.”
“Postmortem contracture,” I said, absorbed in the excavation of the digestive system. “Fire makes the muscles contract, and the limbs often twist into very lifelike positions. Can you bring the light closer?”
I had the esophagus pulled free, and carefully slit the length of it, turning back the flabby tissue. There was some irritation toward the lower end, and there was blood in it, but no sign of rupture or hemorrhage. I bent, squinting up into the pharyngeal cavity, but it was too dark to see much there. I was in no way equipped for detailed exploration, so instead returned my examinations to the other end, slipping a hand under the stomach and lifting it up.
I felt a sharpening of the sense of wrongness that I had had through this whole affair. If there was something amiss, this was the most likely place to find evidence of it. Logic as well as sixth sense said as much.
There was no food in the stomach; after such vomiting that was hardly surprising. When I cut through the heavy muscular wall, though, the sharp scent of ipecac cut through the reek of the body.
“What?” Jamie leaned forward at my exclamation, frowning at the body.
“Ipecac. That quack dosed her with ipecac—and recently! Can you smell it?”
He grimaced with distaste, but took a cautious sniff, and nodded.
“Would that not be a proper thing to do, when you’ve a person wi’ a curdled wame? Ye gave wee Beckie MacLeod ipecacuanha yourself, when she’d drunk your blue stuff.”
“True enough.” Five-year-old Beckie had drunk half a bottle of the arsenic decoction I made to poison rats, attracted by the pale blue color, and evidently not at all put off by the taste. Well, the rats liked it, too. “But I did that right away. There’s no point in giving it hours afterward, when the poison or irritant has already passed out of the stomach.”
Given Fentiman’s state of medical knowledge, though, would he have known that? He might simply have administered ipecac again because he could think of nothing else to do. I frowned, turning back the heavy wall of the stomach. Yes, this was the source of the hemorrhage; the inner wall was raw-looking, dark red as ground meat. There was a small amount of liquid in the stomach; clear lymph that had begun to separate from the clotted blood left in the body.
“So you’re thinking that it was maybe the ipecac that killed her?”
“I was . . . but now I’m not so sure,” I murmured, probing carefully. It had occurred to me that if