The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [79]
“I love ye too, Sassenach,” he said, and gently touched my foot.
I took a mouthful and let it trickle down the back of my throat. It seeped pleasantly through my mucous membranes, hit bottom, and rose up in a puff of soothing, amber-colored smoke that filled all my crevices and began to extend warm, soothing tendrils round the source of my discomfort.
“Oooooo,” I said, sighing, and taking another sip. I closed my eyes, the better to appreciate it. An Irishman of my acquaintance had once assured me that very good whisky could raise the dead. I wasn’t disposed to argue the point.
“That’s wonderful,” I said, when I opened my eyes again. “Where did you get it?” This was twenty-year-old Scotch, if I knew anything about it—a far cry from the raw spirit that Jamie had been distilling on the ridge behind the house.
“Jocasta,” he said. “It was meant to be a wedding gift for Brianna and her young man, but I thought ye needed it more.”
“You’re right about that.”
We sat in a companionable silence, and I sipped slowly, the urge to run amok and slaughter everyone in sight gradually subsiding, along with the level of whisky in the flask.
The rain had moved off again, and the foliage dripped peacefully around us. There was a stand of fir trees near; I could smell the cool scent of their resin, pungent and clean above the heavier smell of wet, dead leaves, smoldering fires, and soggy fabrics.
“It’s been three months since the last of your courses,” Jamie observed casually. “I thought they’d maybe stopped.”
I was always a trifle taken aback to realize how acutely he observed such things—but he was a farmer and a husbandman, after all. He was intimately acquainted with the gynecological history and estrus cycle of every female animal he owned; I supposed there was no reason to think he’d make an exception simply because I was not likely either to farrow or come in heat.
“It’s not like a tap that just switches off, you know,” I said, rather crossly. “Unfortunately. It just gets rather erratic and eventually it stops, but you haven’t any idea when.”
“Ah.”
He leaned forward, arms folded across the tops of his knees, idly watching twigs and bits of leaf bobbing through the riffles of the stream.
“I’d think it would maybe be a relief to have done wi’ it all. Less mess, aye?”
I repressed the urge to draw invidious sexual comparisons regarding bodily fluids.
“Maybe it will,” I said. “I’ll let you know, shall I?”
He smiled faintly, but was wise enough not to pursue the matter; he could hear the edge in my voice.
I sipped a bit more whisky. The sharp cry of a woodpecker—the kind Jamie called a yaffle—echoed deep in the woods and then fell silent. Few birds were out in this weather; most simply huddled under what shelter they could find, though I could hear the conversational quacking of a small flock of migratory ducks somewhere downstream. They weren’t bothered by the rain.
Jamie stretched himself suddenly.
“Ah . . . Sassenach?” he said.
“What is it?” I asked, surprised.
He ducked his head, uncharacteristically shy.
“I dinna ken whether I’ve done wrong or no, Sassenach, but if I have, I must ask your forgiveness.”
“Of course,” I said, a little uncertainly. What was I forgiving him for? Probably not adultery, but it could be just about anything else, up to and including assault, arson, highway robbery, and blasphemy. God, I hoped it wasn’t anything to do with Bonnet.
“What have you done?”
“Well, as to myself, nothing,” he said, a little sheepishly. “It’s only what I’ve said you’d do.”
“Oh?” I said, with minor suspicion. “And what’s that? If you told Farquard Campbell that I’d visit his horrible old mother again . . .”
“Oh, no,” he assured me. “Nothing like that. I promised Josiah Beardsley that ye’d maybe take out his tonsils today, though.”
“That I’d what?” I goggled at him. I’d met Josiah Beardsley, a youth with the worst-looking set of abscessed tonsils I’d ever seen, the day before. I’d been sufficiently impressed by the pustulated state of his adenoids, in fact, to have described them in detail to all