Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [201]
A shorter man could not have managed. Neither could Ian, with his wooden leg. I heard Ian say something under his breath; a prayer I thought, but when I glanced at him, his jaw was clenched, face set in lines of fear.
“What in hell is he going to do up there?” I thought, and was unaware that I had spoken aloud until the barber, shading his eyes next to me, replied.
“There’s a trapdoor built in the roof o’ the printshop, ma’am. Nay doubt Mr. Malcolm means to gain access to the upper story so. Is it his ’prentice up there, d’ye know?”
“No!” Ian snapped, hearing this. “It’s my son!”
The barber shrank back before Ian’s glare, murmuring “Oh, aye, just so, sir, just so!” and crossing himself. A shout from the crowd grew into a roar as two figures appeared on the roof of the chocolate shop, and Ian dropped my hand, springing forward.
Jamie had his arm round Young Ian, who was bent and reeling from the smoke he had swallowed. It was reasonably obvious that neither of them was going to be able to negotiate a return through the adjoining building in his present condition.
Just then, Jamie spotted Ian below. Cupping his hand around his mouth, he bellowed “Rope!”
Rope there was; the Town Guard had come equipped. Ian snatched the coil from an approaching Guardsman, leaving that worthy blinking in indignation, and turned to face the house.
I caught the gleam of Jamie’s teeth as he grinned down at his brother-in-law, and the look of answering wryness on Ian’s face. How many times had they thrown a rope between them, to raise hay to the barn loft, or bind a load to the wagon for carrying?
The crowd fell back from the whirl of Ian’s arm, and the heavy coil flew up in a smooth parabola, unwinding as it went, landing on Jamie’s outstretched arm with the precision of a bumblebee lighting on a flower. Jamie hauled in the dangling tail, and disappeared momentarily, to anchor the rope about the base of the building’s chimney.
A few precarious moments’ work, and the two smoke-blackened figures had come to a safe landing on the pavement below. Young Ian, rope slung under his arms and round his chest, stood upright for a moment, then, as the tension of the rope slackened, his knees buckled and he slid into a gangling heap on the cobbles.
“Are ye all right? A bhalaich, speak to me!” Ian fell to his knees beside his son, anxiously trying to unknot the rope round Young Ian’s chest, while simultaneously trying to lift up the lad’s lolling head.
Jamie was leaning against the railing of the chocolate shop, black in the face and coughing his lungs out, but otherwise apparently unharmed. I sat down on the boy’s other side, and took his head on my lap.
I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the sight of him. When I had seen him in the morning, he had been an appealing-looking lad, if no great beauty, with something of his father’s homely, good-natured looks. Now, at evening, the thick hair over one side of his forehead had been singed to a bleached red stubble, and his eyebrows and lashes had been burned off entirely. The skin beneath was the soot-smeared bright pink of a suckling pig just off the spit.
I felt for a pulse in the spindly neck and found it, reassuringly strong. His breathing was hoarse and irregular, and no wonder; I hoped the lining of his lungs had not been burned. He coughed, long and rackingly, and the thin body convulsed on my lap.
“Is he all right?” Ian’s hands instinctively grabbed his son beneath the armpits and sat him up. His head wobbled to and fro, and he pitched forward into my arms.
“I think so; I can’t tell for sure.” The boy was still coughing, but not fully conscious; I held him against my shoulder like an enormous baby, patting his back futilely as he retched and gagged.
“Is he all right?” This time it was Jamie, squatting breathless alongside me. His voice was so hoarse I wouldn’t have recognized it, roughened as it was by smoke.
“I think so. What about you? You look like Malcolm X,” I said, peering at him over Young Ian’s heaving shoulder.