The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [83]
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I didna mean now. I only meant—I was only wondering if—” The tips of his ears had gone a dull red. He stood up abruptly, brushing dead leaves from his kilt with exaggerated force.
“If,” I said in measured tones, “you were to get me with child at this point in the proceedings, Jamie Fraser, I would have your balls en brochette.” I rocked back, looking up at him. “As for bedding with you, though . . .”
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. I smiled at him, letting what I thought show plainly on my face.
“Once you have a bed again,” I said, “I promise I won’t refuse it.”
“Oh,” he said. He drew a deep breath, looking suddenly quite happy. “Well, that’s all right, then. It’s only—I wondered, ye ken.”
A sudden loud rustling in the shrubbery was followed by the appearance of Mr. Wemyss, whose thin, anxious face poked out of a nannyberry bush.
“Oh, it’s yourself, sir,” he said, in evident relief.
“I suppose it must be,” Jamie said, in resignation. “Is there a difficulty, Mr. Wemyss?”
Mr. Wemyss was delayed in answering, having become inextricably entangled with the nannyberry bush, and I was obliged to go and help release him. A onetime bookkeeper who had been obliged to sell himself as an indentured servant, Mr. Wemyss was highly unsuited to life in the wilderness.
“I do apologize for troubling ye, sir,” he said, rather red in the face. He picked nervously at a spiny twig that had caught in his fair, flyaway hair.
“It’s only—well, she did say as she meant to cleave him from crown to crutch wi’ her ax if he didna leave off, and he said no woman would speak to him in that manner, and she does have an ax . . .”
Accustomed to Mr. Wemyss’s methods of communication, Jamie sighed, reached out for the whisky flask, uncorked it, and took a deep, sustaining swig. He lowered the flask and fixed Mr. Wemyss with a gimlet eye.
“Who?” he demanded.
“Oh! Er . . . did I not say? Rosamund Lindsay and Ronnie Sinclair.”
“Mmphm.”
Not good news; Rosamund Lindsay did have an ax; she was roasting several pigs in a pit near the creek, over hickory embers. She also weighed nearly two hundred pounds and, while normally good-humored, was possessed of a notable temper when roused. For his part, Ronnie Sinclair was entirely capable of irritating the Angel Gabriel, let alone a woman trying to cook in the rain.
Jamie sighed and handed the flask back to me. He squared his shoulders, shaking droplets from his plaid as he settled it.
“Go and tell them I’m coming, Mr. Wemyss,” he said.
Mr. Wemyss’s thin face expressed the liveliest apprehension at the thought of coming within speaking range of Rosamund Lindsay’s ax, but his awe of Jamie was even greater. He bobbed a quick, neat bow, turned, and blundered straight into the nannyberry bush again.
A wail like an approaching ambulance betokened the appearance of Marsali, Joan in her arms. She plucked a clinging branch from Mr. Wemyss’s coat sleeve, nodding to him as she stepped carefully round him.
“Da,” she said, without preamble. “Ye’ve got to come. Father Kenneth’s been arrested.”
Jamie’s eyebrows shot up.
“Arrested? Just now? By whom?”
“Aye, this minute! A nasty fat man who said he was sheriff o’ the county. He came up wi’ two men and they asked who was the priest, and when Father Kenneth said it was him, they seized him by the arms and marched him straight off, with none so much as a by your leave!”
The blood was rising in Jamie’s face, and his two stiff fingers tapped briefly against his thigh.
“They’ve taken him from my hearth?” he said. “A Dhia!”
This was plainly a rhetorical question, and before Marsali could answer it, a crunching of footsteps came from the other direction, and Brianna popped into sight from behind a pine tree.
“What?” he barked at her. She blinked, taken aback.
“Ah . . . Geordie Chisholm says one of the soldiers stole a ham from his fire, and will you go and see Lieutenant Hayes about it?”
“Yes,” he said promptly. “Later. Meanwhile, do you go back wi’ Marsali and find out where they’ve taken Father Kenneth. And