The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [622]
Jamie paid them, then staggered a short distance up the beach and sat down, quite suddenly, in the sand beneath a loblolly pine. He was roughly the same shade as the dead whale, a dirty gray with white blotches.
“Will we wait for ye, sir, and row ye back?” Duff, his purse now bulging healthily, hovered helpfully over Jamie.
“No,” Jamie said. “Take them.” He waved feebly at me and Roger, then closed his eyes and swallowed heavily. “As for me, I believe . . . I shall just . . . swim back.”
101
MONSTERS AND HEROES
THE LITTLE BOYS WERE mad to see the whale, and tugged their reluctant mothers along like kites. I came along, keeping a somewhat more discreet distance from the towering carcass, leaving Jamie on the beach to recover. Roger took Duff aside for a bit of private conversation, while Peter subsided into somnolence in the bottom of the boat.
The carcass was newly washed up on the beach, though it must have been dead for some time before its landing; such an impressive state of decomposition must have taken days to develop. The stench notwithstanding, a number of the more intrepid visitors were standing on the carcass, waving cheerily to their companions on the beach below, and a gentleman armed with a hatchet was employed in hacking chunks of flesh from the side of the animal, dropping these into a pair of large buckets. I recognized him as the proprietor of an ordinary on Hawthorn Street, and made a mental note to strike that establishment from our list of potential eating-places.
Numbers of small crustaceans, not nearly so fastidious in their habits, swarmed merrily over the carcass, and I saw several people, also armed with buckets, picking the larger crabs and crayfish off like ripe fruit. Ten million sand fleas had joined the circus, too, and I retreated to a safe distance, rubbing my ankles.
I glanced back down the beach, seeing that Jamie had risen now and joined the conversation—Duff was looking increasingly restive, glancing back and forth from the whale to his boat. Clearly, he was anxious to return to business, before the attraction should disappear altogether.
At last he succeeded in escaping, and scampered away toward his piretta, looking hunted. Jamie and Roger came toward me, but the little boys were clearly not ready yet to leave the whale. Brianna nobly volunteered to watch them both, so that Marsali could climb the nearby lighthouse tower, to see whether there might be any sign of the Octopus.
“What have you been saying to poor Mr. Duff?” I asked Jamie. “He looked rather worried.”
“Aye? No need of worry,” he said, glancing toward the water, where Duff’s piretta was rapidly pulling back to the quay. “I’ve only put a wee bit of business in his way.”
“He knows where Lyon is,” Roger put in. He looked disturbed, but excited.
“And Mr. Lyon knows where Bonnet is—or if not where, precisely, at least how to get word to him. Let us go a bit higher, aye?” Jamie was still pale; he gestured toward the stair of the tower with his chin, wiping sweat from the side of his neck.
The air was fresher at the top of the tower, but I had little attention to spare for the view out over the ocean.
“And so . . .?” I said, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.
“So I have commissioned Duff to carry a message to Mr. Lyon. All being agreeable, we will meet with Mr. Bonnet at Wylie’s Landing, in a week’s time.”
I swallowed, feeling a wave of dizziness that had nothing to do with the height. I closed my eyes, clutching the wooden rail that surrounded the tiny platform we stood on. The wind was blowing hard, and the boards of the tower creaked and groaned, feeling frighteningly insubstantial.
I heard Jamie shift his weight, moving toward Roger.
“He is a man, ken?” he said quietly. “Not a monster.”
Was he? It was a monster, I thought, who haunted Brianna—and perhaps her father. Would killing him reduce him, make him no more than a man again?
“I know.” Roger’s voice was steady, but lacked conviction.