The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [105]
“No.” Fraser rolled clumsily onto hands and knees, got one knee up, foot braced—and then stopped, clearly contemplating the mechanical considerations involved in getting to his feet. Without comment, Grey stooped, got him under the left arm, and levered him into a standing position, this operation being accompanied by a muffled groan.
“I showed the poem to Siverly,” Fraser said, jerking his coat straight. “He pretended not to know me, but he did. He read it, asked me who I was, then tried to dismiss it as a fraud of some sort, a faked antiquity. Then I turned my back to take my leave, and he tried to kill me.” Despite obvious pain, he gave Grey a lopsided smile. “I suppose ye’d call that evidence, aye?”
“I would, yes.” Grey gave him back the smile. “Thank you, Mr. Fraser.”
“Ye’re most welcome,” Fraser said politely.
Tom arrived at this point with a bowl of water, a cloth, and an anxious-looking young woman.
“Oh, sir,” she cried, seeing Fraser. “Mr. Tom said ye’d been thrown off your horse, the wicked creature, and into a ditch on your head! Are ye damaged at all?”
Fraser looked utterly outraged at the notion that he might have been thrown by an aged mare—plainly this excuse for his appearance would never have occurred to him—but he luckily refrained from speaking his mind and submitted with grimaces to having his face swabbed clean. With ill grace and to the accompaniment of much sympathetic—and some derisive—comment from the taproom, he allowed Grey and Tom to assist him up the stairs, it having become obvious that he could not raise his left knee more than an inch or two. They lowered him upon the bed, whereat he gave an agonized cry and rolled onto one side.
“What’s the matter?” Tom asked anxiously. “Have you injured your spine, Captain? Ye could be paralyzed, if it’s your spine. Can ye wiggle your toes?”
“It’s no my spine,” Fraser said through his teeth. “It’s my arse.”
It would have seemed odd to leave the room, so Grey remained, but in deference to what he assumed to be Fraser’s sensibilities, he stood back and allowed Tom to help Fraser remove his breeches, averting his own gaze without being obvious about it.
A shocked exclamation from Tom made him look, though, and he echoed it with his own.
“Jesus Christ! What the devil did he do to you?” Fraser halflay on the bed, shirt rucked up to display the damage. Nearly the whole of Fraser’s left buttock was an ugly purplish-blue, surrounding a swollen contusion that was almost black.
“I told ye,” Fraser said grouchily, “he tried to cave my heid in. With a sort of club wi’ a knob on one end.”
“He’s got the devil of a bad aim.”
Fraser didn’t actually laugh, but his scowl relaxed a little.
“What you want,” Tom informed him, “is a poultice for bruising. Me mam would make one out of brick dust and egg and a bit of pounded milk thistle, when me and me brothers would get a black eye or summat of the kind.”
“I believe there is a distinct shortage of brick dust in the neighborhood,” Grey said. “But you might see what your inamorata recommends in the nature of a poultice, Tom.”
“Likely a handful of manure,” Fraser muttered.
In the event, Tom returned with the landlord’s wife, bearing a moist cloth full of sliced, charred onions, which she applied, with many expressions of sympathetic horror (punctuated by loud expressions of astonishment as to how such a kind, sweet horse as our Bedelia, and her so gentle a soul as could have given our Lord a ride into Jerusalem, might ever have come to give the gentleman such a cruel toss, which made Fraser grind his teeth audibly), to the sufferer’s shoulder, leaving the more delicate application to Tom.
Owing to the nature of his injuries, Fraser could not lie comfortably on his back, or on either side, and was obliged to lie on his stomach, the bad shoulder cradled by a pillow and the air of the chamber perfumed with the eye-watering fragrance of hot onions.
Grey lounged against the wall by the window, now and then looking out, just in case Siverly might have organized some sort of