The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [583]
“I didna think about it for a moment,” Jamie said softly. “I was on him in two steps, wi’ the chain of my fetters hard against his throat. He hadna time to make a sound.”
The wagon stood no more than ten feet from the lip of the quarry pool; there was a drop of forty feet straight down, and the water below, a hundred feet deep, black and waveless under that hollow white sky.
“I tied him to one of the blocks and threw him over, and then I went back to the wagon. The two men from my group were there, standing like statues in the dim, watching. They said nothing, nor did I. I stepped up and took the reins, they got into the back of the wagon, and I drove toward the prison. We caught up to the column before too long, and all went back together, without a word. No one missed Sergeant Murchison until the next evening, for they thought he was down in the village, off-duty. I dinna think they ever found him.”
He seemed to notice what he was doing, then, and took his hand away from his wrist.
“And the two men?” I asked softly. He nodded.
“Tom Christie and Duncan Innes.”
He sighed deeply, and stretched his arms, shifting his shoulders as though to ease the fit of his shirt—though he wore a loose nightshirt. Then he raised one hand and turned it to and fro, frowning at his wrist in the light.
“That’s odd,” he said, sounding faintly surprised.
“What is?”
“The marks—they’re gone.”
“Marks . . . from the irons?” He nodded, examining both his wrists in bemusement. The skin was fair, weathered to a pale gold, but otherwise unblemished.
“I had them for years—from the chafing, aye? I never noticed that they’d gone.”
I set a hand on his wrist, rubbing my thumb gently over the pulse where his radial artery crossed the bone.
“You didn’t have them when I found you in Edinburgh, Jamie. They’ve been gone a long time.”
He looked down at his arms, and shook his head, as though unable to believe it.
“Aye,” he said softly. “Well, so has Tom Christie.”
PART NINE
A Dangerous Business
96
AURUM
IT WAS QUIET IN THE HOUSE; Mr. Wemyss had gone to the gristmill, taking Lizzie and Mrs. Bug with him, and it was too late in the day for anyone on the Ridge to come visiting—everyone would be at their chores, seeing that the beasts were fed and bedded down, wood and water fetched, the fires built up for supper.
My own beast was already fed and bedded; Adso perched in a somnolent ball in a patch of late sun on the window ledge, feet tucked up and eyes closed in an ecstasy of repletion. My contribution to the supper—a dish Fergus referred to elegantly as lapin aux chanterelles (known as rabbit stew to the vulgar among us)—had been burbling cheerfully away in the cauldron since early morning, and needed no attention from me. As for sweeping the floor, polishing the windows, dusting, and general drudgery of that sort . . . well, if women’s work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn’t being accomplished at any given moment?
I fetched down ink and pen from the cupboard, and the big black clothbound casebook, then settled myself to share Adso’s sun. I wrote up a careful description of the growth on little Geordie Chisholm’s ear, which would bear watching, and added the most recent measurements I had taken of Tom Christie’s left hand.
Christie did suffer from arthritis in both hands, and had a slight degree of clawing in the fingers. Having observed him closely at dinner, though, I was nearly sure that what I was seeing in the left hand was not arthritis, but Dupuytren’s contracture—an odd, hooklike drawing-in of the ring and little fingers toward the palm of the hand, caused by shortening of the palmar aponeurosis.
Ordinarily, I should have been in no doubt, but Christie’s hands were so heavily callused from years of labor that I couldn’t feel the characteristic nodule at the base of the ring finger. The finger had felt wrong to me, though, when I’d first looked at the hand—in the course of stitching a gash across the heel of it—and I’d been checking it, whenever I caught sight of Tom Christie