The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [454]
The voices passed on to the parlor, though, and she relaxed, taking up the thicker brush again.
She resummoned the vision in her mind; the dead man they had laid under a tree at Alamance, near her mother’s makeshift field hospital. She had expected to be shocked by battle-wounds and death—and was instead shocked by her own fascination. She had seen terrible things, but it wasn’t like attending at her mother’s normal surgeries, where there was time to empathize with the patients, to take note of all the small indignities and nastinesses of weak flesh. Things happened too fast on a battlefield; there was too much to be done for squeamishness to take hold.
And in spite of the haste and urgency, each time she had passed near that tree, she had paused for an instant. Bent to turn back the blanket over the corpse and look at the man’s face; appalled at her own fascination but making no effort to resist it—committing to memory the amazing, inexorable change of color and shadow, the stiffening of muscle and shifting of shape, as skin settled and clung to bone, and the processes of death and decay began to work their awful magic.
She hadn’t thought to ask the dead man’s name. Was that unfeeling? she wondered. Probably; the fact was that all her feelings had been otherwise engaged at the time—and still were. Still, she closed her eyes for a moment and said a quick prayer for the repose of the soul of her unknown sitter.
She opened her eyes to see that the light was fading. She scraped the palette and began to clean her brushes and hands, returning slowly and reluctantly to the world outside her work.
Jem would have been fed his supper and bathed already, but he refused to go to bed without being nursed and rocked to sleep. Her breasts tingled slightly at the thought; they were pleasantly full, though they seldom became excruciatingly engorged since he had taken to eating solid food and thus decreased his voracious demands on her flesh.
She’d nurse Jem and put him down, and then go have her own belated supper in the kitchen. She had not eaten with the others, wanting to take advantage of the evening light, and her stomach was growling softly, as the lingering smells of food in the air replaced the astringent scents of turps and linseed oil.
And then . . . then she would go upstairs to Roger. Her lips tightened at the thought; she realized it, and forced her mouth to relax, blowing air out so that her lips vibrated with a flatulent noise like a motorboat.
At this unfortunate moment, Phoebe Sherston’s capped head popped through the door. She blinked slightly, but had sufficiently good manners to pretend that she hadn’t seen anything.
“Oh, my dear, there you are! Do come into the parlor for a moment, won’t you? Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur are so eager to make your acquaintance.”
“Oh—well, yes, of course,” Brianna said, with what graciousness she could summon. She gestured at her paint-stained smock. “Let me just go and change—”
Mrs. Sherston waved away the smock, obviously wanting to show off her tame artist in costume.
“No, no, don’t trouble about that. We are quite simple this evening. No one will mind.”
Brianna moved reluctantly toward the drawing room.
“All right. Only for a minute, though; I need to put Jem to bed.”
Mrs. Sherston’s rosebud mouth primmed slightly at that; she saw no reason why her slaves could not take care of the child altogether—but she had heard Brianna’s opinions on the subject before, and was wise enough not to press the issue.
Brianna’s parents were in the parlor with the Wilburs, who turned out to be a nice, elderly couple—what her mother would call a Darby and Joan. They fussed appropriately over her appearance, insisted politely on seeing the