The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [156]
It was a shallow wound, though impressively long, and while it did still hurt a bit, he’d been honest in saying the itching was worse. Doctor Maguire had recommended a poultice of magnesium sulfate, soap, and sugar, to draw the poisons from the wounds. Doctor Latham, arriving an hour later, had removed the poultice, saying this was all great nonsense, and air would help to dry the stitches.
Grey had lain inert through both processes, having only enough strength to feel gratitude that Doctor Hunter had not come to give his opinion—he would probably have whipped out his saw and made off with the leg, thus settling the argument. Having renewed his acquaintance with the good doctor, he had somewhat more sympathy with Tobias Quinn and his horror of being anatomized after death.
“You’ve got a big willy, Uncle John,” Adam observed.
“About the usual for a grown man, I think. Though I believe it’s given fairly general satisfaction.”
The boys all sniggered, though Grey thought that only Benjamin had any idea why, and wondered with interest where Ben’s tutor had been taking him. Adam and Henry were too young yet to go anywhere, being still in the nursery with Nanny, but Ben had a young man named Whibley who was meant to be teaching him the rudiments of Latin. Minnie said Mr. Whibley spent much more time making sheep’s eyes at the assistant cook than he did in dividing Gaul into three parts, but he did take Ben to the theater now and then, in the name of culture.
“Mama says you killed the other man,” Adam remarked. “Where did you stick him?”
“In the belly.”
“Colonel Quarry said the other man was an uncon-she-ubble tick,” Benjamin said, working out the syllables carefully.
“Unconscionable. Yes, I suppose so. I hope so.”
“For why?” asked Adam.
“If you have to kill someone, it’s best to have a reason.”
All three boys nodded solemnly, like a nestful of owls, but then demanded more details of the duel, eager to hear how much blood there had been, how many times Uncle John had stuck the bad fellow, and what they had said to each other.
“Did he call you vile names and utter foul oaths?” asked Benjamin.
“Foul oafs,” Henry murmured happily to himself. “Foul oafs, foul oafs.”
“I don’t think we said anything, really. That’s what your second does—he goes and talks to the other fellow’s second, and they try to see if things can be arranged so that you don’t need to fight.”
This seemed a most peculiar notion to his audience, and the struggle to explain just why one wouldn’t always want to fight someone exhausted him, so that he greeted with relief the arrival of a footman bearing a tray—even though the tray bore nothing more than a bowl of gray slop that he assumed was gruel and another of bread and milk.
The boys ate the bread and milk, passing the bowl round the bed in a companionable way, dribbling on the covers and vying with one another to tell him the news of the household: Nasonby had fallen down the front stair and had to have his ankle strapped up; Cook had had a disagreement with the fishmonger, who sent plaice instead of salmon, and so the fishmonger wouldn’t bring any more fish, and so supper last night was pancakes and they all pretended it was Shrove Tuesday; Lucy the spaniel had had her pups in the bottom of the upstairs linen closet, and Mrs. Weston the housekeeper had had a fit—
“Did she fall down and foam at the mouth?” Grey asked, interested.
“Probably,” Benjamin said cheerfully. “We didn’t get to look. Cook gave her sherry, though.”
Henry and Adam were by now cuddling against his sides, their wriggly warmth and the sweet smell of their heads a comfort that, in his weakness, threatened to make him tearful again. To avoid this, Grey cleared his throat and asked Ben to recite something for him.
Ben frowned thoughtfully, looking so much like Hal considering a hand of cards that Grey’s emotion changed abruptly to amusement. He managed not to laugh—it hurt his chest very much to laugh—and relaxed, listening to an execrably performed rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” this interrupted by the