The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [609]
“You hold; I’ll snip.” I slid off the fence and took the shears.
There ensued a brief but noisy interlude, after which the five piglets were sent off to a consolatory meal of kitchen scraps, their rear aspects heavily daubed with a tar and turpentine mixture to prevent infection.
“What do you think?” I asked, seeing them settle down to their feeding in an apparent state of content. “If you were a pig, I mean. Would you rather root for your food, but keep your balls, or give them up and wallow in luxurious swill?” These would be kept penned, raised carefully on slops for tender meat, while most of the pigs were routinely turned out into the wood to manage for themselves.
Jamie shook his head.
“I suppose they canna miss what they’ve never had,” he said. “And they’ve had food, after all.” He leaned on the fence for a few moments, watching the curly tails begin to wag and twirl with pleasure, the tiny wounds beneath apparently forgotten.
“Besides,” he added cynically, “a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy—though I havena met many who’d wish them gone, for all that.”
“Well, priests might find them a burden, I suppose.” I pulled the stained shirt gingerly away from my body before lifting it over my head. “Phew. Nothing smells worse than pig excrement—nothing.”
“What—not a blackbirder’s hold, or a rotting corpse?” he asked, laughing. “Festering wounds? A billy goat?”
“Pig shit,” I said firmly. “Hands down.”
Jamie took the wadded shirt from me and ripped it into strips, reserving the cleanest ones for jobs like wiping tools and wedging cracks. The rest he consigned to the fire, stepping back as a random breeze blew a plume of reeking smoke in our direction.
“Aye, well, there was Narses. He was a great general, or so they say, in spite of being a eunuch.”
“Perhaps a man’s mind works better without the distraction,” I suggested, laughing.
He gave no more than a brief snort in reply to this, though it was tinged with amusement. He shoveled dirt onto the cinders of the fire, while I retrieved my cautery iron and tar-pot, and we went back to the house, talking of other things.
My mind lingered on that one remark, though—“a pair of ballocks may bring a man more sorrow than joy.” Had he been speaking only generally? I wondered. Or had there been some personal allusion lurking in it?
In everything he had ever said to me regarding his brief marriage to Laoghaire MacKenzie—little as that was, by our common consent—there had been no hint that he had felt physically drawn to her. He had wed her from loneliness and a sense of duty, wanting some small anchor in the emptiness his life had been after his return from England. Or so he had said.
And I believed what he’d said. He was a man of honor and duty, and I knew what his loneliness had been—for I had had my own. On the other hand, I knew his body, nearly as well as my own. If it had a great capacity to endure hardship, it had an equal capacity to experience great joy. Jamie could be ascetic from necessity—never from natural temperament.
Most of the time I succeeded in forgetting that he had shared Laoghaire’s bed, however briefly and—he said—unsatisfactorily. I did not forget that she had been, and was still, quite an attractive woman.
Which left me rather wishing that Jenny Murray had found some other inspiration for the conversion of her feelings toward her brother.
JAMIE WAS QUIET and abstracted through the rest of the day, though he roused himself to be sociable when Fergus and Marsali arrived with their children for a visit after supper. He taught Germain to play draughts, while Fergus recalled for Roger the words of a ballad he had picked up in the alleys of Paris as a juvenile pickpocket. The women retired to the hearth to stitch baby gowns, knit booties, and—in honor of Marsali’s advancing