Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [424]
But if I closed my eyes entirely, I could hear Joe’s voice speaking, even allowing for the faint Caribbean lilt of slave-English. I cracked my eyelids and looked carefully, searching for any signs of resemblance. There were none, but I did see what I had seen before, and not noticed, among the other scars and marks on the man’s battered torso. What I had thought merely a scrape was in fact a deep abrasion that overlay a wide, flat scar, cut in the form of a rough square just below the point of the shoulder. The mark was raw and pink, newly healed. I should have seen it at once, if not for the darkness of the orlop, and the scrape that obscured it.
I lay quite still, trying to remember. “No slave name,” Joe had said derisively, referring to his son’s self-christening. Clearly, Ishmael had cut away an owner’s brand, to prevent identification, should he be recaptured. But whose? And surely the name Ishmael was no more than coincidence.
Maybe not so farfetched a one, though; “Ishmael” almost certainly wasn’t the man’s real name. “They be callin’ me Ishmael,” he had said. That, too, was a slave name, given him by one owner or another. And if young Lenny had been climbing his family tree, as it seemed, what more likely than that he should have chosen one of his ancestors’ given names in symbol? If. But if he was…
I lay looking up at the claustrophobic ceiling of the berth, suppositions spinning through my head. Whether this man had any link with Joe or not, the possibility had reminded me of something.
Jamie was catechizing the man about the personnel and structure of the Bruja—for so the ship that had attacked us had been—but I was paying no attention. I sat up, cautiously, so as not to make the dizziness worse, and signaled to Fergus.
“I need air,” I said. “Help me up on deck, will you?” Jamie glanced at me with a hint of worry, but I smiled reassuringly at him, and took Fergus’s arm.
“Where are the papers for that slave we bought on Barbados?” I demanded, as soon as we were out of earshot of the cabin. “And where’s the slave, for that matter?”
Fergus looked at me curiously, but obligingly rummaged in his coat.
“I have the papers here, milady,” he said, handing them to me. “As for the slave, I believe he is in the crew’s quarters. Why?” he added, unable to restrain his curiosity.
I ignored the question, fumbling through the grubby, repellent bits of paper.
“There it is,” I said, finding the bit I remembered Jamie reading to me. “Abernathy! It was Abernathy! Branded on the left shoulder with a fleur-de-lys. Did you notice that mark, Fergus?”
He shook his head, looking mildly bewildered.
“No, milady.”
“Then come with me,” I said, turning toward the crew’s quarters. “I want to see how big it is.”
The mark was about three inches long and three wide; a flower, surmounting the initial “A,” burned into the skin a few inches below the point of the shoulder. It was the right size, and in the right place, to match the scar on the man Ishmael. It wasn’t, however, a fleur-de-lys; that had been the mistake of a careless transcriber. It was a sixteen-petaled rose—the Jacobite emblem of Charles Stuart. I blinked at it in amazement; what patriotic exile had chosen this bizarre method of maintaining allegiance to the vanquished Stuarts?
“Milady, I think you should return to your bed,” Fergus said. He was frowning at me as I stooped over Temeraire, who bore this inspection as stolidly as everything else. “You are the color of goose turds, and milord will not like it at all if I allow you to fall down on the deck.”
“I won’t fall down,” I assured him. “And I don’t care what color I am. I think we’ve just had a stroke of luck. Listen, Fergus, I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything, milady,” he said, grabbing me by the elbow as a shift in the wind sent me staggering across the