The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [376]
I turned back to find Jamie already on his feet, and Wylie rising from his knees, both soaked with coffee, and both with expressions implying that they intended to resume proceedings at the point where I had interrupted them. I pushed my way between them and stamped my foot.
“I have bloody well had enough of this!”
“I haven’t!” Wylie said hotly. “He has impugned my honor, and I demand—”
“Oh, to hell with your beastly honor—and yours, too!” I snarled, glaring from him to Jamie. Jamie, who had evidently been going to say something equally inflammatory, contented himself instead with a resounding snort.
I kicked one of the fallen stools, and pointed at it, still glaring at Jamie.
“Sit!”
Plucking the soaked fabric of his shirt away from his chest, he righted the stool and sat on it, with immense dignity.
Wylie was less inclined to pay attention to me, and was carrying on with further remarks about his honor. I kicked him in the shin. This time, I was wearing stout boots. He yelped and hopped on one foot, holding his affronted leg. The horses, thoroughly roused by the commotion, were stamping and snorting in their boxes, and the air was full of floating chaff.
“Ye dinna want to trifle with her when she’s in a temper,” Jamie told Wylie, with a wary glance at me. “She’s dangerous, aye?”
Wylie glowered at me, but his scowl altered to a look of uncertainty—whether because of the empty coffee jug, which I was now holding by the neck like a club, or because of his memories of the night before, when he had discovered me in the midst of Betty’s autopsy. With an effort, he swallowed whatever he had been going to say, and sat slowly down upon the other stool. He pulled a kerchief from his stained waistcoat pocket, and blotted a trickle of blood that was running down the side of his face from a cut above the brow.
“I would like,” he said, with exquisite politeness, “to know what is going on here, please.”
He had lost his wig; it was lying on the floor in a puddle of coffee. Jamie bent and picked it up, holding it gingerly, like a dead animal. He wiped a smear of mud off the side of his jaw with his free hand, and held the wig out, dripping, to Wylie.
“We are in agreement, then, sir.”
Wylie took the wig with a stiff nod of acknowledgment and laid it on his knee, disregarding the coffee soaking into his breeches. Both men looked at me, with identical expressions of skeptical impatience. Evidently, I had been appointed mistress of ceremonies.
“Robbery, murder, and heaven knows what else,” I said firmly. “And we mean to get to the bottom of it.”
“Murder?” Roger and Wylie spoke together, both sounding startled.
“Who has been murdered?” Wylie asked, looking wildly back and forth between me and Jamie.
“A slave woman,” Jamie said, with a nod toward me. “My wife suspected ill doing in her death, and so we meant to discover the truth of the matter. Thus our presence in the shed when you came upon us last night.”
“Presence,” Wylie echoed. His face was already pale, but he looked slightly ill at the recollection of what he had seen me doing in the shed. “Yes. I . . . see.” He darted a look at me from the corner of his eye.
“So she was killed?” Roger came into the circle of lantern light and set the bucket back in place, sitting down at my feet. He set the remains of the cake on the floor. “What killed her?”
“Someone fed her ground glass,” I said. “I found quite a lot of it still in her stomach.”
I paid particular attention to Phillip Wylie as I said this, but his face bore the same expression of blank astonishment as did Jamie’s and Roger’s.
“Glass.” Jamie was the first to recover. He sat up on his stool, shoving a disordered hank of hair behind his ear. “How long might that take to kill a body, Sassenach?”
I rubbed two fingers between my brows; the numbness of the early hour was giving way to a throbbing headache, made worse by the rich smell of coffee and the fact that I hadn’t gotten to drink any of it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It would go into the stomach within minutes, but it might take quite a long time to do enough damage