The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [443]
“I’ll be damned,” I said, leaning to the side to look at his face. “You aren’t going to die, are you?”
Sweat poured from his face, and the rags of his shirt hung dark and sodden against his chest, but the edge of his mouth trembled in an attempt at a smile.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I ain’t.” He was still breathing in short gasps, but the breaths were deeper. “Ally. Baby’s . . . next . . . month. Told her . . . I be there.”
I picked up the edge of the blanket with my free hand, and wiped some of the sweat from his face.
“We’ll do our best to see that you are,” I assured him, then glanced up at the lawyer, who had been watching these proceedings with his mouth hanging slightly open.
“Mr. Forbes. I think perhaps we had better take Mr. Morton back to my tent. Will you find a couple of men to carry him?”
He closed his mouth abruptly.
“Oh. Yes. Of course, Mrs. Fraser. At once.” He didn’t move right away, though, and I saw his eyes dart toward the wet sheet of paper plastered over Morton’s back. I glanced down at it. I could read only a few indistinct words between my fingers, but those were enough to tell me that Jamie’s casually insulting references to Forbes as a sodomite were likely inaccurate. “My darling Valencia,” the letter began. I knew only one woman named Valencia in the vicinity of Cross Creek—in the colony of North Carolina, for that matter. Farquard Campbell’s wife.
“I’m terribly sorry about your paper,” I said, looking up at Forbes. Holding his gaze with my own, I carefully rubbed the palm of my hand over the sheet of paper, irrevocably smearing every word on it into a mess of blood and ink. “I’m afraid it’s quite ruined.”
He took a deep breath, and clapped his hat back on his head.
“That is quite all right, Mrs. Fraser. Perfectly all right. I’ll—go and fetch some men.”
EVENING BROUGHT RELIEF from the flies, as well as the heat. Drawn by sweat, blood, and manure, they swarmed over the encampment, biting, stinging, crawling, and buzzing in maddening fashion. Even after they had gone, I kept slapping absentmindedly at arms and neck, imagining I felt the tickle of feet.
But they were gone, at last. I glanced round my small kingdom, saw that everyone was breathing—if with an astounding variety of sound effects—and ducked out of the tent for a breath of cool air, myself.
A highly undervalued activity, breathing. I stood for a moment, eyes closed, appreciating the easy rise and fall of my bosom, the soft inrush, the cleansing flux. Having spent the last several hours in keeping air out of Isaiah Morton’s chest, and getting it into Roger’s, I was inclined to cherish the privilege. Neither of them would draw a single breath without pain for some time—but they were both breathing.
They were my only remaining patients; the other seriously wounded had all been claimed by the surgeons of their own companies, or taken to the Governor’s tent to be tended by his personal physician. Those with minor injuries had gone back to their fellows, to boast of their scars or nurse their pains with beer.
I heard a ruffle of drums in the distance, and stood still, listening. A solemn cadence played, and stopped abruptly. There was a moment’s silence, in which all motion seemed suspended, and then the boom of a cannon.
The Lindsay brothers were nearby, sprawled on the ground by their fire. They too had looked up at the sound of drums.
“What is it?” I called to them. “What’s happening?”
“They’re bringin’ up the dead, Mrs. Fraser,” Evan called back. “Ye’ll no be worrit, aye?”
I waved to them in reassurance, and began to walk toward the creek. The frogs were singing, a descant to the distant drums. Full military honors for the battle dead. I wondered whether the two hanged ringleaders would be buried in the same place, or whether some separate and less honorable grave would be set aside for them, if their families didn’t claim them. Tryon wasn’t the sort to leave even an enemy to the flies.
He would know by now, surely. Would he