Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [91]
“Dinna trouble yourself, Mac Dubh,” he said softly. “Ye canna stop it, anyway.”
Surreptitious sounds were coming from the far corner of the cell, the sounds Morrison had tried to keep him from hearing. Scraping noises, brief mutters, a thud. Then the muffled sound of blows, slow and regular, and a heavy gasping of fright and pain, punctuated with a small whimpering sound of indrawn breath.
They were beating young Angus MacKenzie. He braced his hands beneath his chest, but the effort made his back blaze and his head swim. Morrison’s hand was back, forcing him down.
“Be still, Mac Dubh,” he said. His tone was a mixture of authority and resignation.
A wave of dizziness washed through him, and his hands slipped off the bench. Morrison was right in any case, he realized. He couldn’t stop them.
He lay still then under Morrison’s hand, eyes closed, and waited for the sounds to stop. Despite himself, he wondered who it was, that administrator of blind justice in the dark. Sinclair. His mind supplied the answer without hesitation. And Hayes and Lindsay helping, no doubt.
They could no more help themselves than he could, or Morrison. Men did as they were born to. One man a healer, another a bully.
The sounds had stopped, except for a muffled, sobbing gasp. His shoulders relaxed, and he didn’t move as Morrison took away the last wet poultice and gently blotted him dry, the draft from the window making him shiver in sudden chill. He pressed his lips tight, to make no noise. They had gagged him this afternoon, and he was glad of it; the first time he had been flogged, years ago, he had bitten his lower lip nearly in two.
The cup of whisky pressed against his mouth, but he turned his head aside, and it disappeared without comment to some place where it would find a more cordial reception. Milligan, likely, the Irishman.
One man with the weakness for drink, another with a hatred of it. One man a lover of women, and another…
He sighed and shifted slightly on the hard plank bed. Morrison had covered him with a blanket and gone away. He felt drained and empty, still in fragments, but with his mind quite clear, perched at some far remove from the rest of him.
Morrison had taken away the candle as well; it burned at the far end of the cell, where the men sat hunched companionably together, the light making black shapes of them, one indistinguishable from another, rimmed in gold light like the pictures of faceless saints in old missals.
He wondered where they came from, these gifts that shaped a man’s nature. From God?
Was it like the descent of the Paraclete, and the tongues of fire that came to rest on the apostles? He remembered the picture in the Bible in his mother’s parlor, the apostles all crowned with fire, and looking fair daft with the shock of it, standing about like a crowd of beeswax candles, lit for a party.
He smiled to himself at the memory, and closed his eyes. The candle shadows wavered red on his lids.
Claire, his own Claire—who knew what had sent her to him, had thrust her into a life she had surely not been born to? And yet she had known what to do, what she was meant to be, despite that. Not everyone was so fortunate as to know their gift.
There was a cautious shuffling in the darkness beside him. He opened his eyes and saw no more than a shape, but knew nonetheless who it was.
“How are ye, Angus?” he said softly in Gaelic.
The youngster knelt awkwardly by him, and took his hand.
“I am…all right. But you—sir, I mean…I—I’m sorry…”
Was it experience or instinct that made him tighten his own hand in reassurance?
“I am all right, too,” he said. “Lay ye down, wee Angus, and take your rest.”
The shape bent its head in an oddly formal gesture, and pressed a kiss on the back of his hand.
“I—may I stay by ye, sir?”
His hand weighed a ton, but he lifted it nonetheless and laid it on the young man’s head. Then it slipped away, but he felt Angus’s tension relax,