Текст книги "An echo in the bone"
Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon
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Текущая страница: 64 (всего у книги 75 страниц)
“Poor Laoghaire!” I said. “But putting her aside—and do let’s—what do you think of Joan’s quandary?”
He shook his head dubiously.
“Well, I can maybe bribe Laoghaire to marry yon wee cripple, but it would take a deal of money, since she’d want more than she gets from me now. I havena got that much left of the gold we brought, so it would need to wait until I can get back to the Ridge and extract some more, take that to a bank, arrange for a draft… I hate to think of Joan having to spend a year at home, trying to keep yon lust-crazed weasels apart.”
“Lust-crazed weasels?” I said, entertained. “No, really. Did you see them at it?”
“Not exactly,” he said, coughing. “Ye could see there was an attraction atween them, though. Here, let’s go along the shore; I saw a curlew’s nest the other day.”
The wind had quieted and the sun was bright and warm—for the moment. I could see clouds lurking over the horizon, and doubtless it would be raining again by nightfall, but for the moment it was a lovely spring day, and we were both disposed to enjoy it. By unspoken consent, we put aside all disagreeable matters and talked of nothing in particular, only enjoying each other’s company, until we reached a shallow, grass-covered mound where we could perch and enjoy the sun.
Jamie’s mind seemed to return now and then to Laoghaire, though—I supposed he couldn’t help it. I didn’t really mind, as such comparisons as he made were entirely to my benefit.
“Had she been my first,” he said thoughtfully at one point, “I think I might have a much different opinion of women in general.”
“Well, you can’t define all women in terms of what they’re like—or what one of them is like—in bed,” I objected. “I’ve known men who, well…”
“Men? Was Frank not your first?” he demanded, surprised.
I put a hand behind my head and regarded him.
“Would it matter if he wasn’t?”
“Well…” Clearly taken aback by the possibility, he groped for an answer. “I suppose—” He broke off and eyed me, meditatively stroking one finger down the bridge of his nose. One corner of his mouth turned up. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t know, myself. On the one hand, I rather enjoyed his shock at the notion—and at my age, I was not at all averse to feeling mildly wanton, if only in retrospect. On the other hand…
“Well, where do you get off, anyway, casting stones?”
“Ye were my first,” he pointed out, with considerable asperity.
“So you said,” I said, teasing. To my amusement, he flushed up like the rosy dawn.
“Ye didna believe me?” he said, his voice rising in spite of himself.
“Well, you did seem rather well informed, for a so-called virgin. To say nothing of… imaginative.”
“For God’s sake, Sassenach, I grew up on a farm! It’s a verra straightforward business, after all.” He looked me closely up and down, his gaze lingering at certain points of particular interest. “And as for imagining things … Christ, I’d spent months—years!—imagining!” A certain light filled his eyes, and I had the distinct impression that he hadn’t stopped imagining in the intervening years, not by any means.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, intrigued.
“I’m thinking that the water in the loch’s that wee bit chilly, but if it didna shrink my cock straight off, the feel of the heat when I plunged into ye … Of course,” he added practically, eyeing me as though estimating the effort involved in forcing me into the loch, “we wouldna need to do it in the water, unless ye liked; I could just dunk ye a few times, drag ye onto the shore, and—God, your arse looks fine, wi’ the wet linen of your shift clinging to it. It goes all transparent, and I can see the weight of your buttocks, like great smooth round melons—”
“I take it back—I don’t want to know what you’re thinking!”
“You asked,” he pointed out logically. “And I can see the sweet wee crease of your arse, too—and once I’ve got ye pinned under me and ye canna get away… d’ye want it lying on your back, Sassenach, or bent over on your knees, wi’ me behind? I could take a good hold either way, and—”
“I am not going into a freezing loch in order to gratify your perverted desires!”
“All right,” he said, grinning. Stretching himself out beside me, he reached round behind and took a generous handful. “Ye can gratify them here, if ye like, where it’s warm.”
OENOMANCY
LALLYBROCH WAS A working farm. Nothing on a farm can stop for very long, even for grief. Which is how it came to be that I was the only person in the front of the house when the door opened in the middle of the afternoon.
I heard the sound and poked my head out of Ian’s study to see who had come in. A strange young man was standing in the foyer, gazing round appraisingly. He heard my step and turned, looking at me curiously.
“Who are you?” we said simultaneously, and laughed.
“I’m Michael,” he said, in a soft, husky voice with the trace of a French accent. “And ye’ll be Uncle Jamie’s faery-woman, I suppose.”
He was examining me with frank interest, and I felt therefore free to do the same.
“Is that what the family’s been calling me?” I asked, looking him over.
He was a slight man, lacking either Young Jamie’s burly strength or Young Ian’s wiry height. Michael was Janet’s twin but did not resemble her at all, either. This was the son who had gone to France, to become a junior partner in Jared Fraser’s wine business, Fraser et Cie. As he took off his traveling cloak, I saw that he was dressed very fashionably for the Highlands, though his suit was sober in both color and cut—and he wore a black crepe band around his upper arm.
“That, or the witch,” he said, smiling faintly. “Depending whether it’s Da or Mam who’s talking.”
“Indeed,” I said, with an edge—but couldn’t help smiling back. He was quiet but an engaging young man—well, relatively young. He must be near thirty, I thought.
“I’m sorry for your… loss,” I said, with a nod toward the crepe band. “May I ask—”
“My wife,” he said simply. “She died two weeks ago. I should have come sooner, else.”
That took me aback considerably.
“Oh. I … see. But your parents, your brothers and sisters—they don’t know this yet?”
He shook his head and came forward a little, so the light from the fanshaped window above the door fell on his face, and I saw the dark circles under his eyes and the marks of the bone-deep exhaustion that is grief’s only consolation.
“I am so sorry,” I said, and, moved by impulse, put my arms around him. He leaned toward me, under the same impulse. His body yielded for an instant to my touch, and there was an extraordinary moment in which I sensed the deep numbness within him, the unacknowledged war of acknowledgment and denial. He knew what had happened, what was happening—but could not feel it. Not yet.
“Oh, dear,” I said, stepping back from the brief embrace. I touched his cheek lightly, and he stared at me, blinking.
“I will be damned,” he said mildly. “They’re right.”
A DOOR OPENED and closed above, I heard a foot on the stair—and an instant later, Lallybroch awoke to the knowledge that the last child had come home.
The swirl of women and children wafted us into the kitchen, where the men appeared, by ones and twos through the back door to embrace Michael or clap him on the shoulder.
There were outpourings of sympathy, the same questions and answers repeated several times—how had Michael’s wife, Lillie, died? She had died of the influenza; so had her grandmother; no, he himself had not caught it; her father sent his prayers and concerns for Michael’s father—and eventually the preparations for washing and supper and the putting of children to bed began, and Michael slipped out of the maelstrom.
Coming out of the kitchen myself to fetch my shawl from the study, I saw him at the foot of the stair with Jenny, talking quietly. She touched his face, just as I had, asking him something in a low voice. He half-smiled, shook his head, and, squaring his shoulders, went upstairs alone to see Ian, who was feeling too poorly to come down to supper.
ALONE AMONG THE Murrays, Michael had inherited the fugitive gene for red hair, and burned among his darker siblings like a coal. He had inherited an exact copy of his father’s soft brown eyes, though. “And a good thing, too,” Jenny said to me privately, “else his da would likely be sure I’d been at it wi’ the goatherd, for God knows, he doesna look like anyone else in the family.”
I’d mentioned this to Jamie, who looked surprised but then smiled.
“Aye. She wouldna ken it, for she never met Colum MacKenzie face-to-face.”
“Colum? Are you sure?” I looked over my shoulder.
“Oh, aye. The coloring’s different—but allowing for age and good health … There was a painting at Leoch, done of Colum when he was maybe fifteen, before his first fall. Recall it, do ye? It hung in the solar on the third floor.”
I closed my eyes, frowning in concentration, trying to reconstruct the floor plan of the castle.
“Walk me there,” I said. He made a small amused noise in his throat but took my hand, tracing a delicate line on my palm.
“Aye, here’s the entrance, wi’ the big double door. Ye’d cross the courtyard, once inside, and then …”
He walked me unerringly to the exact spot in my mind, and sure enough, there was a painting there of a young man with a thin, clever face and look of far-seeing in his eyes.
“Yes, I think you’re right,” I said, opening my eyes. “If he is as intelligent as Colum, then… I have to tell him.”
Jamie’s eyes, dark with thought, searched my face.
“We couldna change things, earlier,” he said, a note of warning in my voice. “Ye likely canna change what’s to come in France.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But what I knew—what I told you, before Culloden. It didn’t stop Charles Stuart, but you lived.”
“Not on purpose,” he said dryly.
“No, but your men lived, too—and that was on purpose. So maybe—just maybe—it might help. And I can’t live with myself if I don’t.”
He nodded, sober.
“Aye, then. I’ll call them.”
THE CORK EASED free with a soft pop!, and Michael’s face eased, too. He sniffed the darkened cork, then passed the bottle delicately under his nose, eyes half closing in appreciation.
“Well, what d’ye say, lad?” his father asked. “Will it poison us or no?”
He opened his eyes and gave his father a mildly dirty look.
“You said it was important, aye? So we’ll have the negroamaro. From Apulia,” he added, with a note of satisfaction, and turned to me. “Will that do, Aunt?”
“Er… certainly,” I said, taken back somewhat. “Why ask me? You’re the wine expert.”
Michael glanced at me, surprised.
“Ian said—” he began, but stopped and smiled at me. “My apologies, Aunt. I must have misunderstood.”
Everyone turned and looked at Young Ian, who reddened at this scrutiny.
“What exactly did ye say, Ian?” Young Jamie asked. Young Ian narrowed his eyes at his brother, who seemed to be finding something funny in the situation.
“I said,” Young Ian replied, straightening himself defiantly, “that Auntie Claire had something of importance to say to Michael, and that he must listen, because she’s a… a…”
“Ban-sidhe, he said,” Michael ended helpfully. He didn’t grin at me, but a deep humor glowed in his eyes, and for the first time I saw what Jamie had meant by comparing him to Colum MacKenzie. “I wasn’t sure whether he meant that, Auntie, or if it’s only you’re a conjure-woman—or a witch.”
Jenny gasped at the word, and even the elder Ian blinked. Both of them turned and looked at Young Ian, who hunched his shoulders defensively.
“Well, I dinna ken exactly what she is,” he said. “But she’s an Auld One, isn’t she, Uncle Jamie?”
Something odd seemed to pass through the air of the room; a sudden live, fresh wind moaned down the chimney, exploding the banked fire and showering sparks and embers onto the hearth. Jenny got up with a small exclamation and beat them out with the broom.
Jamie was sitting beside me; he took my hand and fixed Michael with a firm sort of look.
“There’s no real word for what she is—but she has knowledge of things that will come to pass. Listen to her.”
That settled them all to attention, and I cleared my throat, deeply embarrassed by my role as prophet but obliged to speak nonetheless. For the first time, I had a sudden sense of kinship with some of the more reluctant Old Testament prophets. I thought I knew just what Jeremiah felt like when told to go and prophesy the destruction of Nineveh. I just hoped I’d get a better reception; I seemed to recall that the inhabitants of Nineveh had thrown him into a well.
“You’ll know more than I do about the politics in France,” I said, looking directly at Michael. “I can’t tell you anything in terms of specific events for the next ten or fifteen years. But after that… things are going to go downhill fast. There’s going to be a revolution. Inspired by the one that’s happening now in America, but not the same. The King and Queen will be imprisoned with their family, and both of them will be beheaded.”
A general gasp went up from the table, and Michael blinked.
“There will be a movement called the Terror, and people will be pulled out of their homes and denounced, all the aristocrats will either be killed or have to flee the country, and it won’t be too good for rich people in general. Jared may be dead by then, but you won’t be. And if you’re half as talented as I think, you will be rich.”
He snorted a little at that, and there was a breath of laughter in the room, but it didn’t last long.
“They’ll build a machine called the guillotine—perhaps it already exists, I don’t know. It was originally made as a humane method of execution, I think, but it will be used so often that it will be a symbol of the Terror, and of the revolution in general. You don’t want to be in France when that happens.”
“I—how do ye know this?” Michael demanded. He looked pale and half belligerent. Well, here was the rub. I took a firm grip of Jamie’s hand under the table and told them how I knew.
There was a dead silence. Only Young Ian didn’t look dumbfounded—but he knew already, and more or less believed me. I could tell that most of those around the table didn’t. At the same time, they couldn’t really call me a liar.
“That’s what I know,” I said, speaking straight to Michael. “And that’s how I know it. You have a few years to get ready. Move the business to Spain, or Portugal. Sell out and emigrate to America. Do anything you like—but don’t stay in France for more than ten years more. That’s all,” I said abruptly. I got up and went out, leaving utter silence in my wake.
I SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised, but I was. I was in the hen coop, collecting eggs, when I heard the excited squawk and flutter of the hens outside that announced someone had come into their yard. I fixed the last hen with a steely glare that dared her to peck me, snatched an egg out from under her, and came out to see who was there.
It was Jenny, with an apronful of corn. That was odd; I knew the hens had already been fed, for I’d seen one of Maggie’s daughters doing it an hour earlier.
She nodded to me and tossed the corn in handfuls. I tucked the last warm egg into my basket and waited. Obviously she wanted to talk to me and had made an excuse to do so in private. I had a deep feeling of foreboding.
Entirely justified, too, for she dropped the last handful of cracked corn and, with it, all pretense.
“I want to beg a favor,” she said to me, but she avoided my eye, and I could see the pulse in her temple going like a ticking clock.
“Jenny,” I said, helpless either to stop her or to answer her. “I know—”
“Will ye cure Ian?” she blurted, lifting her eyes to mine. I’d been right about what she meant to ask, but wrong about her emotion. Worry and fear lay behind her eyes, but there was no shyness, no embarrassment; she had the eyes of a hawk, and I knew she would rip my flesh like one if I denied her.
“Jenny,” I said again. “I can’t.”
“Ye can’t, or ye won’t?” she said sharply.
“I can’t. For God’s sake, do you think I wouldn’t have done it already if I had the power?”
“Ye might not, for the sake of the grudge ye hold against me. If that’s it—I’ll say I’m sorry, and I do mean it, though I meant what I did for the best.”
“You… what?” I was honestly confused, but this seemed to anger her.
“Dinna pretend ye’ve no notion what I mean! When ye came back before, and I sent for Laoghaire!”
“Oh.” I hadn’t quite forgotten that, but it hadn’t seemed important, in light of everything else. “That’s … all right. I don’t hold it against you. Why did you send for her, though?” I asked, both out of curiosity and in hopes of diffusing the intensity of her emotion a little. I’d seen a great number of people on the ragged edge of exhaustion, grief, and terror, and she was firmly in the grip of all three.
She made a jerky, impatient motion and seemed as though she would turn away but didn’t.
“Jamie hadn’t told ye about her, nor her about you. I could see why, maybe, but I kent if I brought her here, he’d have nay choice then but to take the bull by the horns and clear up the matter.”
“She nearly cleared him up,” I said, beginning to get somewhat hot myself. “She shot him, for God’s sake!”
“Well, I didna give her the gun, did I?” she snapped. “I didna mean him to say whatever he said to her, nor her to take up a pistol and put a ball in him.”
“No, but you told me to go away!”
“Why wouldn’t I? Ye’d broken his heart once already, and I thought ye’d do it again! And you wi’ the nerve to come prancing back here, fine and blooming, when we’d been … we’d been—it was that that gave Ian the cough!”
“That—”
“When they took him away and put him in the Tolbooth. But you werena here when that happened! Ye werena here when we starved and froze and feared for the lives of our men and our bairns! Not for any of it! You were in France, warm and safe!”
“I was in Boston, two hundred years from now, thinking Jamie was dead,” I said coldly. “And I can’t help Ian.” I struggled to subdue my own feelings, uncorked with a rush by this ripping of scabs off the past, and found compassion in the look of her, her fine-boned face gaunt and harrowed with worry, her hands clenched so hard that the nails bit into the flesh.
“Jenny,” I said more quietly. “Please believe me. If I could do anything for Ian, I’d give my soul to do it. But I’m not magic; I haven’t any power. Only a little knowledge, and not enough. I’d give my soul to do it,” I repeated, more strongly, leaning toward her. “But I can’t. Jenny… I can’t.”
She stared at me in silence. A silence that lengthened past bearing, and finally I stepped around her and walked toward the house. She didn’t turn around, and I didn’t look back. But behind me, I heard her whisper.
“You have nay soul.”
PURGATORY II
WHEN IAN FELT WELL enough, he came out walking with Jamie. Sometimes only as far as the yard or the barn, to lean on the fence and make remarks to Jenny’s sheep. Sometimes he felt well enough to walk miles, which amazed—and alarmed—Jamie. Still, he thought, it was good to walk side by side through the moors and the forest and down beside the loch, not talking much but side by side. It didn’t matter that they walked slowly; they always had, since Ian had come back from France with a wooden leg.
“I’m lookin’ forward to having back my leg,” Ian had remarked casually once, when they sat in the shelter of the big rock where Fergus had lost his hand, looking out over the small burn that ran down at the foot of the hill, watching for the stray flash of a leaping trout.
“Aye, that’ll be good,” Jamie had said, smiling a little—and a little wry about it, too, recalling when he’d waked after Culloden and thought his own leg missing. He’d been upset and tried to comfort himself with the thought that he’d get it back eventually, if he made it out of purgatory and into heaven. Of course, he’d thought he was dead, too, but that hadn’t seemed nearly as bad as the imagined loss of his leg.
“I dinna suppose ye’ll have to wait,” he said idly, and Ian blinked at him.
“Wait for what?”
“Your leg.” He realized suddenly that Ian had no notion what he’d been thinking, and hastened to explain.
“So I was only thinking, ye wouldna spend much time in purgatory—if at all—so ye’ll have it back soon.”
Ian grinned at him. “What makes ye sae sure I willna spend a thousand years in purgatory? I might be a terrible sinner, aye?”
“Well, aye, ye might be,” Jamie admitted. “Though if so, ye must think the devil of a lot of wicked thoughts, because if ye’d been doing anything, I’d know about it.”
“Oh, ye think so?” Ian seemed to find this funny. “Ye havena seen me in years. I might ha’ been doing anything, and ye’d never ken a thing about it!”
“Of course I would,” Jamie said logically. “Jenny would tell me. And ye dinna mean to suggest she wouldna ken if ye had a mistress and six bastard bairns, or ye’d taken to the highways and been robbing folk in a black silk mask?”
“Well, possibly she would,” Ian admitted. “Though come on, man, there’s nothing ye could call a highway within a hundred miles. And I’d freeze to death long before I came across anyone worth robbin’ in one o’ the passes.” He paused, eyes narrowed against the wind, contemplating the criminal possibilities open to him.
“I could ha’ been stealing cattle,” he offered. “Though there’re sae few beasts these days, the whole parish would ken it at once should one go missing. And I doubt I could hide it amongst Jenny’s sheep wi’ any hope of its not bein’ noticed.”
He thought further, chin in hand, then reluctantly shook his head.
“The sad truth is, Jamie, no one’s had a thing worth stealin’ in the Highlands these twenty years past. Nay, theft’s right out, I’m afraid. So is fornication, because Jenny would ha’ killed me already. What does that leave? There’s no really anything to covet…. I suppose lying and murder is all that’s left, and while I’ve met the odd man I would ha’ liked to kill, I never did.” He shook his head regretfully, and Jamie laughed.
“Oh, aye? Ye told me ye killed men in France.”
“Well, aye, I did, but that was a matter of war—or business,” he added fairly. “I was bein’ paid to kill them; I didna do it out o’ spite.”
“Well, then, I’m right,” Jamie pointed out. “Ye’ll sail straight through purgatory like a rising cloud, for I canna think of a single lie ye’ve ever told me.”
Ian smiled with great affection.
“Aye, well, I may ha’ told lies now and then, Jamie—but no, not to you.”
He looked down at the worn wooden peg stretched before him and scratched at the knee on that side.
“I wonder, will it feel different?”
“How could it not?”
“Well, the thing is,” Ian said, wiggling his sound foot to and fro, “I can still feel my missing foot. Always have been able to, ever since it went. Not all the time, mind,” he added, looking up. “But I do feel it. A verra strange thing. Do ye feel your finger?” he asked curiously, raising his chin at Jamie’s right hand.
“Well… aye, I do. Not all the time, but now and then—and the nasty thing is that even though it’s gone, it still hurts like damnation, which doesna seem really fair.”
He could have bitten his tongue at that, for here Ian was dying, and him complaining that the loss of his finger wasn’t fair. Ian wheezed with amusement, though, and leaned back, shaking his head.
“If life was fair, then what?”
They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the wind move through the pines on the hillside opposite. Then Jamie reached into his sporran and brought out the tiny white-wrapped package. It was a bit grubby from being in his sporran but had been tidily preserved and tightly wrapped.
Ian eyed the little bundle in his palm.
“What’s this?”
“My finger,” Jamie said. “I—well… I wondered whether ye’d maybe not mind to have it buried with ye.”
Ian looked at him for a moment. Then his shoulders started to shake.
“God, don’t laugh!” Jamie said, alarmed. “I didna mean to make ye laugh! Christ, Jenny will kill me if ye cough up a lung and die out here!”
Ian was coughing, fits of it interspersed with long-drawn-out wheezes of laughter. Tears of mirth stood in his eyes, and he pressed both fists into his chest, struggling to breathe. At last, though, he left off and straightened slowly up, making a sound like a bellows. He sniffed deep and casually spat a glob of horrifying scarlet into the rocks.
“I’d rather die out here laughin’ at you than in my bed wi’ six priests say-in’ prayers,” he said. “Doubt I’ll get the chance, though.” He put out a hand, palm up. “Aye, give it here.”
Jamie laid the little white-wrapped cylinder in his hand, and Ian tucked the finger casually into his own sporran.
“I’ll keep it safe ’til ye catch me up.”
HE CAME DOWN through the trees and made his way toward the edge of the moorland that lay below the cave. It was sharply cold, with a stiff breeze blowing, and the light changed over the land like the flicker of a bird’s wings as the clouds slid overhead, long and fleeting. He’d picked up a deer trail through the heather earlier in the morning, but it had disappeared in a stony fall near a brae, and now he was coming back toward the house; he was behind the hill on which the broch stood, this side of it thick with a little wood of beech and pine. He’d not seen a deer or even a coney this morning, but wasn’t bothered.
With so many in the house, they could use a deer, to be sure—but he was happy only to be out of the house, even if he came back with nothing.
He couldn’t look at Ian without wanting to stare at his face, to commit him to memory, to impress these last bits of his brother-in-law upon his mind in the way that he recalled special vivid moments, there to be taken out and lived through again at need. But at the same time, he didn’t want to remember Ian as he was now; much better to keep what he had of him: firelight on the side of Ian’s face, laughing fit to burst as he’d forced Jamie’s arm over in a wrestling match, his own wiry strength surprising them both. Ian’s long, knob-jointed hands on the gralloch knife, the wrench and the hot metal smell of the blood that smeared his fingers, the look of his brown hair ruffling in the wind off the loch, the narrow back, bent and springy as a bow as he stooped to snatch one of his toddling bairns or grandchildren off their feet and throw them up giggling into the air.
It was good they’d come, he thought. Better than good that they’d brought the lad back in time to speak to his father as a man, to comfort Ian’s mind and take his leave properly. But to live in the same house with a beloved brother dying by inches under your nose wore sadly on the nerves.
With so many women in the house, squabbling was inevitable. With so many of the women Frasers, it was like walking through a gunpowder mill with a lit candle. Everyone tried so hard to manage, to keep in countenance, to accommodate—but that only made it worse when some spark finally set the powder keg off. He wasn’t only out hunting because they needed meat.
He spared a sympathetic thought for Claire. After Jenny’s anguished request, Claire had taken to hiding in their room or in Ian’s study—he had invited her to use it, and Jamie thought that aggravated Jenny still more—writing busily, making the book Andy Bell had put in her mind. She had great powers of concentration and could stay inside her mind for hours—but she had to come out to eat. And it was always there, the knowledge that Ian was dying, grinding like a quern, slow but relentless, wearing away the nerves.
Ian’s nerves, too.
He and Ian had been walking—slowly—by the side of the loch two days before, when Ian stopped suddenly, curling in on himself like an autumn leaf. Jamie hurried to take him by the arm before he could fall, and he lowered him to the ground, finding a boulder to brace his back, pulling the shawl high around the wasted shoulders, looking for anything, anything at all he could do.
“What is it, a charaid?” he said, anxious, crouching beside his brother-in-law, his friend.
Ian was coughing, almost silently, his body shaking with the force of it. At last the spasm eased and he could draw breath, his face bright with the consumptive flush, that terrible illusion of health.
“It hurts, Jamie.” The words were spoken simply, but Ian’s eyelids were closed, as though he didn’t want to look at Jamie while he spoke.
“I’ll carry ye back. We’ll get ye a bit of laudanum, maybe, and—”
Ian waved a hand, quelling his anxious promises. He breathed shallowly for a moment before shaking his head.
“Aye, my chest feels like there’s a knife in it,” he said finally. “But that’s no what I meant. I’m no bothered so much about dying—but Christ, the slowness of it is killing me.” He did open his eyes then, meeting Jamie’s, and laughed as silently as he’d coughed, the barest breath of sound as his body shook with it.
“This dying hurts me, Dougal. I’d have it over.” The words came into his mind as clearly as if they’d been spoken just now in front of him, rather than thirty years before in a dark church, ruined by cannon fire. Rupert had said that, dying slow. “You’re my chief, man,” he’d said to Dougal, imploring. “It’s your job.” And Dougal MacKenzie had done what love and duty called for.
He had been holding Ian’s hand, clasping hard, trying to force some notion of well-being from his own calloused palm into Ian’s thin gray skin. His thumb slid upward now, pressing on the wrist where he had seen Claire grip, searching out the truth of a patient’s health.
He felt the skin give, sliding across the bones of Ian’s wrist. He thought suddenly of the blood vow given at his marriage, the sting of the blade and Claire’s cold wrist pressed to his and the blood slick between them. Ian’s wrist was cold, too, but not from fear.
He glanced at his own wrist, but there was no trace of a scar, either from vows or fetters; those wounds were fleeting, long-healed.
“D’ye remember when we gave each other blood for blood?” Ian’s eyes were closed, but he smiled. Jamie’s hand tightened on the bony wrist, a little startled but not truly surprised that Ian had reached into his mind and caught the echo of his thoughts.
“Aye, of course.” He couldn’t help a small smile of his own, a painful one.
