Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [125]
I had been asking myself that with each touch of a button, each rumble of a motor, and was quite sure that the answer was “yes.” Time didn’t make all the difference, after all; I could walk across the city and find people who lived without many of these conveniences—farther abroad and there were entire countries where people lived in reasonable content and complete ignorance of electricity.
For myself, I had never cared a lot. I had lived with my uncle Lamb, an eminent archaeologist, since my own parents’ death when I was five. Consequently, I had grown up in conditions that could conservatively be called “primitive,” as I accompanied him on all his field expeditions. Yes, hot baths and light bulbs were nice, but I had lived without them during several periods of my life—during the war, for instance—and never found the lack of them acute.
The water had cooled enough to be tolerable. I dropped the dressing gown on the floor and stepped in, feeling a pleasant shiver as the heat at my feet made my shoulders prickle in cool contrast.
I subsided into the tub and relaxed, stretching my legs. Eighteenth-century hip baths were barely more than large barrels; one normally bathed in segments, immersing the center of the body first, with the legs hanging outside, then stood up and rinsed the upper torso while soaking the feet. More frequently, one bathed from a pitcher and basin, with the aid of a cloth.
No, conveniences and comforts were merely that. Nothing essential, nothing I couldn’t do without.
Not that conveniences were the only issue, by a long chalk. The past was a dangerous country. But even the advances of so-called civilization were no guarantee of safety. I had lived through two major “modern” wars—actually served on the battlefields of one of them—and could see another taking shape on the telly every evening.
“Civilized” warfare was, if anything, more horrifying than its older versions. Daily life might be safer, but only if one chose one’s walk in it with care. Parts of Roxbury now were as dangerous as any alley I had walked in the Paris of two hundred years past.
I sighed and pulled up the plug with my toes. No use speculating about impersonal things like bathtubs, bombs, and rapists. Indoor plumbing was no more than a minor distraction. The real issue was the people involved, and always had been. Me, and Brianna, and Jamie.
The last of the water gurgled away. I stood up, feeling slightly light-headed, and wiped away the last of the bubbles. The big mirror was misted with steam, but clear enough to show me myself from the knees upward, pink as a boiled shrimp.
Dropping the towel, I looked myself over. Flexed my arms, raised them overhead, checking for bagginess. None; biceps and triceps all nicely defined, deltoids neatly rounded and sloping into the high curve of the pectoralis major. I turned slightly to one side, tensing and relaxing my abdominals—obliques in decent tone, the rectus abdominis flattening almost to concavity.
“Good thing the family doesn’t run to fat,” I murmured. Uncle Lamb had remained trim and taut to the day of his death at seventy-five. I supposed my father—Uncle Lamb’s brother—had been constructed similarly, and wondered suddenly what my mother’s backside had looked like. Women, after all, had a certain amount of excess adipose tissue to contend with.
I turned all the way round and peered back over my shoulder at the mirror. The long columnar muscles of my back gleamed wetly as I twisted; I still had a waist, and a good narrow one, too.
As for my own backside—“Well, no dimples, anyway,” I said aloud. I turned around and stared at my reflection.
“It could be a lot worse,” I said to it.
* * *
Feeling somewhat heartened, I put on my nightgown and went about the business of putting the house to bed. No cats to put out, no dogs to feed—Bozo, the last of our dogs, had died of old age the year before, and I had not wanted to get another, with Brianna off at school and my own hours at the hospital long and irregular.
Adjust the thermostat, check the locks of windows